“The hypocrite, certainly, is a secret atheist; for if he did believe there was a God, he durst not be so bold as to deceive Him to His face.”
— Thomas Adams (1583–1652)
In the languages of Scripture, faith is not “I think these doctrines are true.” That’s “belief.” Greek, πίστις (pistis) means trust, fidelity, reliability, covenant-loyalty. It’s relational and embodied. It comes from the verb πείθω (peithō): to persuade, to win confidence. In Koine Greek papyri (the language of the New Testament), people pledge to do something “μετὰ καλῆς πίστεως” (“with good faith”), or appeal to “ἡ ἀγαθὴ πίστις” (good/trustworthy faith) in contracts and friendships. Roman writers pair fides with amicitia: faithfulness and friendship. The point is the same: pistis isn’t a head-nod; it’s the quality of a person or bond you can bank your life on. Faith is relational.
When Scripture was translated into Greek (the Septuagint), pistis carried Israel’s vocabulary of trust and faithfulness: אָמַן (’āman)—to be firm, reliable; אֱמוּנָה (’emunah)—steadfastness, fidelity; בָּטַח (batach)—to trust; חָסָה (chasah)—to take refuge. So, Genesis 15:6 says, “Abram believed God,” and God counted it as righteousness. That’s not “Abram agreed with a proposition.” Abraham lived by it and refused to be like other men and tribes. He entrusted himself to the God who promised life out of barrenness. He was blessed to be a blessing. Habakkuk 2:4 ties righteousness to faith/faithfulness: “the righteous shall live by (his) faith/faithfulness,” which Paul cites in Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11. Faith is an ongoing relational reality, and not a belief. It’s ontological.
By the time we reach Paul, pistis did not shrivel into opinions about God and doctrinal statements. It’s the lived posture of allegiance (i.e., discipleship) to Jesus as Lord alone. Paul’s “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5), or obedience that comes from faith, is the same as James’ “faith without works is dead” (James 2:17, 26). Faith demands more than accurate knowledge. Faith is what holds us to the Path when we doubt and stumble, and when others aren’t walking it. Belief alone is a mask concealing the real unbeliever.
Faith surrenders because it trusts in God. In truth, this is the natural posture of humanity before we attempted to take God’s control and dominion for ourselves. Here we can see not only how humanity has inverted the world, but also how the Gospel was meant to put it back right. Also, if we pause long enough here to listen to it, it exposes false gospels and prophets in our time.
In Galatians 5:6, Paul reminds us that real belief also requires agape love: “faith working through love.” The old debate over πίστις Χριστοῦ (“faith of Christ” or “faith in Christ”) is a false dichotomy. The latter will produce the former and vice versa. It’s not either/or, but both/and, and a reminder that faith intrinsically implies becoming faithful and trustworthy, not saving face and managing reputations. Faith is relational fidelity under God as King of all Reality. It’s letting go of the need to be God and allowing our heart and mind to be changed (Romans 12:1-3).
Faith and “belief” (the way Americans use them) are not the same thing.
“Belief” in Greek Isn’t Your Modern Category
“Pistis… could also point to the personal commitment that accompanies any genuine belief… Hence the term means ‘loyalty’ or ‘allegiance.’ This was what Caesar demanded from his subjects.”
— N. T. Wright, Paul: A Biography.
Greek doesn’t give us a tidy abstract noun for belief the way modern English does. Different languages think differently. The Greeks had words like δοκέω (dokeō), as discussed, and νομίζω (nomizō), meaning “to hold customary views.” What we now call dogma or orthodoxy is not what Scripture calls faith, nor is it the proper object of faith itself. The noun δόγμα (dogma) comes from δοκέω (dokeō), meaning “what seems right” or “what one decides upon.” In early usage, it referred to an accepted opinion or decree: whatever appeared good to an authority or assembly. δόξα (doxa), from the same root, meant “appearance,” “reputation,” or “opinion,” and by the New Testament period had been elevated to mean “glory” or “honor.” By contrast, δόγμα in the New Testament had hardened into a “formal decree” (Luke 2:1; Acts 16:4; Eph 2:15)—not an act of trust but a rule to be obeyed. Gnōsis (γνῶσις), on the other hand, was knowledge rooted in reality and soul; dogma was the teaching and views of a group.
True knowledge is not something humans control but something that transforms us on the inside.
“Belief” as bare assent is a cheap and knock-off of faith. It’s not a check box or a magic phrase we comply with to feel better about ourselves, or to justify our disdain for humanity. Faith changes everything until it’s transformed into something true and trustworthy. This does not happen out there, but in the closest of our relationships and in the proximity of our neighbors. Faith shows up in business and politics, in our social media posts, in texting, and in screen time. It is depicted in our budgets, avoidances, anger, and nightmares. Belief is something that happens on Sunday mornings. Faith is what happens on Monday.
The New Testament uses pisteuō in that strong sense: “believe in me” is better rendered “trust in me” (John 14:1). And James ridicules the counterfeit: “You believe God is one? Good. Even the demons believe—and shudder” (James 2:19). Another way of saying that is that, “At least the demons you blame honestly respond when God is mentioned.” They recognize facts and know they are not God, so we should stop pretending to. Luke, in Acts, gives the darker case study: the sons of Sceva wield Jesus’ name like a technique; the demon replies, “Jesus I know, Paul I recognize—who are you?” (Acts 19:15). Recognition, and even acknowledgment, does not equal relationship. Belief pretending to be faith is dangerous to both the wielder and the converts of that belief.
Jesus’ words make it clear how slippery of a slope it can be to make sure we don’t get lost in the hype, confusion, fancy lights, and shows of power: “For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24). It’s important to note that Jesus’ emphasis is on the hearer, not on the people “the elect” want to hear this.
If faith never crosses from nodding at truths to staking oneself on Christ, it’s not just dogma with a cross logo but deceptively demonic. The Christian walk is one of confession, honesty, grace, boldness, peace, love, joy, long-suffering, contentment in God, truth, gentleness, and a love that rips through masks, theological reframing, and social distancing. It is not a weak path to walk.
The New Testament’s Other Words for “Knowing” and “Thinking”
Caesar did not care if you actually believed he was a son of god; he just wanted your allegiance and compliance. What you actually thought and believed was of little consequence; your allegiance is what mattered. And that you followed the dogmas Rome had decreed as final.
Romans lived in the realm of appearance, opinion, and authority. None of these touches the world of pistis. The apostles didn’t use dogma when they talked about faith, because faith wasn’t about public approval or religious branding. They didn’t use dogma either, because faith wasn’t submission to an institution’s decree. Paul used gnōmē when he was careful to say, “This is just my judgment, not a command from the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:25)—he knew the difference between opinion and revelation. The language itself draws the map: dokein and doxa belong to seeming, gnōmē to reasoning, dogma to ruling. Pistis belongs to living.
That distinction alone should make us stop and rethink what “faith” even means in our age of Christian marketing and denominational tribalism. When faith becomes dogma, it hardens into a decree. When it becomes doxa, it dissolves into reputation and optics. But when it stays pistis, it holds—loyal, relational, embodied.
Knowledge That Counts Is Ontological and Holonic
Γνῶσις (gnōsis, “knowledge”) in Scripture is not a stack of facts; it’s knowing by participation. Hebrew ידע (yada‘) already hints at that—“Adam knew Eve” intimately and experientially, not as an acquaintance. The New Testament keeps that texture: “This is eternal life: that they know You… and Jesus Christ” (John 17:3). Paul’s favorite intensified form, ἐπίγνωσις, marks true knowledge of God that’s relational, transformative, and ineffable. Ephesians 3:19 asks that we “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,” and Philippians 3:10 wants to “know him and the power of his resurrection.” That is to share in it and not constrain it.
It’s ontological because it changes your being. It’s holonic because it nests all your parts inside the Whole—Christ in you, you in Christ, all in God. You don’t control this kind of knowledge; it Gnōmē meant a personal judgment or opinion, the product of your own reasoning. If “knowledge” puffs up and hardens mercy, Paul says it’s not Christian knowledge at all (1 Cor 8:1). Wisdom is when you practice truth long enough that it lays claim to your body.
The order is clean: faith (commitment) → knowledge (participation) → wisdom (embodied truth). Belief is only good insofar as it serves that arc.
Where We Go Wrong: “Jesus-Plus” and the Contract Religions
Americans are very religious, even if they deny it. We pledge pistis all the time to financial security, comfort, parties, platforms, influencers, denominations, shopping carts, causes, movements, talking points, and the economy. That’s faith misplaced and groupthink trying to fake it until it makes it. We add conditions to belonging and call it “orthodoxy,” but it’s really control. Churches say, “faith alone in Jesus, plus these things, and you can’t vote for that party.” We turn righteousness into an external contract: sign here; keep our code; police the boundary; shame the breaker; scapegoat the other. It’s the old serpent’s tree—control good and evil, posture above your neighbor, become like God in judgment, and burn the garden down while you’re at it.
That is not the covenant of God. It’s a Pharisaical mimetic war: rival tribes needing an enemy to feel pure. It produces a “faith” that is loud, brittle, and perpetually outraged. The theology at work is Jesus-plus something else. The more “plus” we have added, the less room we have had for trust. The object of faith has quietly shifted from Christ to the contract, and people are starting to notice.
Scripture will not let false faith masquerade as Christian cosplay: “God is not mocked.” Watch how Paul dismantles it in Romans 10:5–13.
Romans 10:5–13, Straight Through
10:5 – “The righteousness that is by the Law…”
Paul cites Leviticus 18:5: “The person who does these things will live by them.” That’s Moses describing the covenant terms. The problem isn’t Torah; it’s us. When humans turn life with God into a performative contract, we externalize righteousness, monetize virtue, and weaponize failure. Contracts produce score-keeping and scapegoats. They can restrain chaos; they can’t create love. They prevent honest growth to protect how things were.
10:6–8 – “But the righteousness of faith says…”
Paul turns to Deuteronomy 30. Don’t go up to heaven; don’t descend into the abyss. We don’t need to go looking for them. “The word is near you— in your mouth and in your heart.” In Deuteronomy, it meant Israel didn’t have to mount a cosmic quest; God placed His covenant word close enough to practice. Paul reads that whole promise Christologically. We don’t engineer salvation—Christ has come to us. The covenant has always aimed at the heart-mouth-brain axis—inner trust becoming outward confession and lived behavior. Faith replaces heroic control with humble commitment to the God of all, not just our tribe.
10:9–10 – “Confess… believe…”
This word is pisteuo. It means, “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord’ and trust in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you are saved.” We flattened that into a prayer formula that turned into a business model, and tempted us to run the world with it. In Rome, “Chirst is Lord” was a public oath that defied “Caesar is Lord.” Christians were a minority, and such a stance put their lives on the line. Faith for them was a lot more raw and real than the American Facebook fetish with it. Heart-belief isn’t a mental assent. It’s whole-person reliance on the God who vindicated Jesus in resurrection. You will have to die with Jesus to be a Christian, and you will continue to.
“Believes unto righteousness … confesses unto salvation”: the inner allegiance re-makes you; the outer confession locates you. If your “faith” cannot risk your mouth under Caesar, Social Media, or your board, you’re still hedging your bets. Faith is when a person can make what is inside match their outside behavior, when a person can stand in Truth and Love wholly, without contingency or clause, even if the entire world is at odds with them, even through suffering and death.
Kierkegaard’s honest critique of false faith in 1800 Europe, as well as his criticism of Christian Nationalism under a different government, ought to silence every Christian nationalist who mistakes power for faith, since it exposed them as heretics and “unbelievers.” Not only is it an idol, but Christian nationalism logically falls apart as soon as insular Americans realize that this is what their founders fled from to start this country. It also logically falls apart as they see that any other nation can adopt the same premise. “If you live by the sword, you die by the sword.”
“…It transforms Christianity into something entirely different from what it is in the New Testament, yea, into exactly the opposite; and this is the Christianity of ‘Christendom,’ of us men.”
— Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom
10:11 – “No one who trusts in him will be put to shame.”
Isaiah promises that the one who trusts will not be shamed, in large part because that person will have dealt with their shame and fear. To trust the Lord implies being the person who also allows the Lord can trust. To trust the Lord means to do it in the fractions in between seconds and to meet Him in the deepest and darkest caverns of our souls, to allow His light ot expose and lay bare all sin and falsehood. Slapping it on a dollar does not make a nation trust Him: it’s a respectful nod at best. Faith has to outlast contempt from mimetic crowds. Consider how people who were misunderstood in their time, like Isaiah and Ezekiel or Carl Jung and Kierkegaard, and how their words proved truer than the normal “truth” around them at the time. Paul answers shame with vindication: God publicly vindicated Jesus; He will vindicate those loyal to Jesus. That is oxygen for people suffocating under the tribe’s scorn. “The Lord gives and takes away.” What is to us if the world is the means by which He takes our life?
10:12 – “No distinction… the same Lord is Lord of all.”
Here, Paul blows up societal and tribal perimeters: Jew/Greek. In Galatians, he’ll add male and female, and slave and master. Every possible reason for division and false pride is diminished. All collapse under one Lord, just as God is All in All. This does not mean there are no gender or differences, but there is no longer room for division and scapegoating. Any “faith” that shrinks your circle while God widens His isn’t pistis; it’s fear. If Faith doesn’t produce Love, it is not Truth, and vice versa. Jesus doesn’t secure our boundary; He creates His family.
10:13 – “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
Joel’s line was aimed straight at the nation of Israel when they had their head up their butt, and he still said “Everyone.” Not everyone who passes your test or follows your government: everyone who calls. Calling is faith made audible—dependence voiced, avoidance dismantled, projection repented from, and Divine allegiance named. Above family, denomination, ideology, party, and circumstances. Salvation happens there: heart and mouth lining up under the only name that saves. Even if the nation doesn’t get it, God always saves a remnant (c.f. Romans 9-11)
Paul, in Romans 10, was not hawking tribal dogma, but massacring them. He deconstructed contract righteousness and reconstructed natural relationships, centered on the risen Lord walking within living disciples, also open to all who call. There’s a corrective for our egoic Jesus-plus ecologies.
Of course, there are behaviors, habits, and decisions that are sinful, and they ought to be taken seriously by all of us. However, even that word has been twisted and misplaced, and then abused to the point it no longer represents the biblical definition of sin. The word “toxic” in our culture is a great equivalent to what sin really meant. Addiction is also another good word for it, and far from the substance abuse most people also don’t understand. As “integrated,” “healthy,” and “whole” are accurate words for “holy.” Righteousness, then, is the fruit the faithful bear as they go about doing what they are becoming.
Sin is something that every person also understands, at least in part. Humanity is just as aware of what sin is as they are of what true faith is. People understand there’s a human condition and that it also plagues them. This is why they go to counseling, recovery, therapy, as well as read books, practice magic, or listen to podcasts. It’s in large part what is driving the religious fervor and zeal. The entire social media climate is rife with sins and violations of Jesus’ specific commands that Protestants are comfortable justifying to point out their people’s sins. Likewise, the rest of humanity is doing the same. People are dying for something real that helps with all of it.
Bringing It All Together Without Fluff
- Faith (pistis) is alignment, trust, and fidelity. It is relational (to the living God), embodied (heart and mouth, calendar and wallet, eating and drinking), and covenantal acceptance (you live inside an unconditional promise, not a performance contract).
- Belief as Americans use it (“I agree with this idea”) is not what Scripture commands. Beliefs come and go. Faith must be chosen and surrendered to. The apostles care about truth, yes, but truth in relationship and intimate relationships of our lives, and in how we carry ourselves and operate in the world. Recognition without relationship is demonic parody (James 2; Acts 19) and a near-enemy of love. If your “beliefs” never require trust, you’re not in biblical territory yet.
- Knowledge (gnōsis/epignōsis) is participation. We don’t know facts from a distance: they impact us. We can ignore and avoid them, maybe even be unaware of what we do not know. We know God by entrusting ourselves to Him and walking with Him. It is ontological (it changes what you are) and holonic (your life gets nested in Christ’s way of living). Real knowledge is something we can love or hate. It is something we can wrestle with and discover more of, only by allowing it to change us in the process.
- Misplaced faith is still faith. When our deepest trust rests in party, platform, teacher, or doctrinal perimeter, we’ve built an altar and called it church. The fruit is pride, rivalry, and scapegoats. It’s the Tree of Knowledge and Evil posturing that dares to judge from above (as God). Repentance means we hand the gavel back to God and return to Jesus alone. “Vengeance belongs to the Lord” just as much as vindication.
No More Faking It
If faith hasn’t cost you membership points with your tribe at least once, check the object of your trust. If your knowledge has made you harder and less understanding, you know about an idea of a god; that’s all. If you don’t love, you don’t have faith. If your belief never pulls your body into obedience, it’s just a loud opinion. If you’ve painted yourself into a corner with knowledge and “beliefs,” that’s desperation.
Hypocrisy might be the last remaining obstacle for an unbeliever to be saved.
The call isn’t to tribal religions or institutional loyalty, but to the ancient, concrete thing the apostles meant.
This is the way the Church survives the present cynicism: not as a club protecting its reputation, but as a people of pistis—real allegiance to the real God—who keep discovering that the word is already near, in our hearts and on our lips. Not Jesus-plus. Just follow Jesus.
It’s enough to break any proud, addictive, and egoic man, and it’s also the invitation.
