Faith,belief And Religion.

[Tab'le De'Bah-Rye]

Peace be with you all.

 

I thought i would throw this out there and i will ask a church scholar if a suitable solution isn't found. What is the difference between faith,belief and religion, there must be a difference because all three words are mentioned individually in holy scripture so i assume there is a difference, i know what jesus says true religion to tend the widow and orphan(and i guess the list goes on and on outside of the gospel) is but i would be hazarding a guess at the other two except where jesus says you must have faith like a child. But there is a difference right, what are the differences? And should the differences be more commonly understood? Because i think we throw the words around without actually understanding the biblical meanings of these three presumably very different words.

 

Onward christian souls

JESUS iz LORD.

[blazeingstar]

Religion--typically refers to a set of tenants as written.  EG.  Catholic, Buddist, Mormon

 

Faith--typically refers to the adherence of a person to such a belief, and sometimes to greater principles

 

Belief--typically refers to the interplay of faith and religion as well as outside forces like money, government and science.

 

Bibically, I think we have to be very careful because none of these words--religion, faith, and belief-- existed as we know them today.  Religion well, that was just Judaism...if you weren't a Jew you were a pagan.  There were no athiests, agnostics and various splintered faiths.  Everyone, by want or by force, worshiped God or worshiped gods.

 

Faith and belief, like love, has many translations in the Greek, Aramaic and Latin, so we sometimes trip over these words.  Sometimes one fits more than the other, and sometimes culturally we use one in place of the other.  The Dewey Rehims is a great translation, but it sometimes can be a bit too literal to the exact translation rather than the context which is FAR more important and could mean an entirely different word.

[Tab'le De'Bah-Rye]

 

Bibically, I think we have to be very careful because none of these words--religion, faith, and belief-- existed as we know them today.  

 

My understanding is that God never changes therefore the holy word of God never changes either. What i mean is the words still mean the same thing in the christian sense. The world outside of the church may use the words incorrectly. I understand what the world means when it says these words but we should careful we are to be in the world but not of the world. This is all just my opinion anyway. But your input was cool, i just disagree with this one bit strongly.

Edited October 5, 2013 by Tab'le Du'Bah-Rye

[Tab'le De'Bah-Rye]

Couldn't edit again so here is the last bit i wanted to add...

And i understand the tree grows from a seed, but the tree is still the same roots and same tree, an apple tree can't bear the fruit of a pear tree, nore can a grapevine bear brambles and thickets, then the grape vine would not be a greapevine, it would be a bramble or a thicket. Again i do understand a tree grows, but the dna is still the same dna from the seed and without it it isn't a tree at all.

Edited October 5, 2013 by Tab'le Du'Bah-Rye

[blazeingstar]

My understanding is that God never changes therefore the holy word of God never changes either. What i mean is the words still mean the same thing in the christian sense. The world outside of the church may use the words incorrectly. I understand what the world means when it says these words but we should careful we are to be in the world but not of the world. This is all just my opinion anyway. But your input was cool, i just disagree with this one bit strongly.

 

 

God dosn't change but language does.

 

Couldn't edit again so here is the last bit i wanted to add...

And i understand the tree grows from a seed, but the tree is still the same roots and same tree, an apple tree can't bear the fruit of a pear tree, nore can a grapevine bear brambles and thickets, then the grape vine would not be a greapevine, it would be a bramble or a thicket. Again i do understand a tree grows, but the dna is still the same dna from the seed and without it it isn't a tree at all.

 

this isn't a debate on what is, but rather an explanation that biblical language--like all language--reflects the time and place it was written.

 

In the northeast US "wicked" means cool but say that in the Bible Belt and they will run you out of town.  In the west "weak sauce" means something lame, but to Floridians weak sauce is what they feed Grandma.

 

Therin the problem is not with the Bible, but with language and why it's important to go back to the old languages we both understand it greater and our word usage changes.

[Catherine Therese]

As an Australian living in an American convent for 18 months I'm afraid I committed all sorts of faux pas of this nature!! You'd never believe how different two English-speaking countries could be!  :paperbag:

 

Tab'le, recall also that the Scriptures we read in English are TRANSLATIONS - and often translations OF translations.

 

I do a lot of work with Scripture in the ancient languages. You'd be amazed at how differences in the language can impact the extent to which a translation conveys faithfully the full meaning and intent of the original. The differences in the language are multi-dimensional... I mean, firstly, there are the different character sets, the different words, the different language constructs. But then there is the difference that hundreds/thousands of years make. Translators of Scripture need to take all of this into account and render a translation that conveys, as faithfully as they can, the original intention, so they compensate with less-than-literally-accurate word exchanges sometimes, or sometimes meaning is fractionally compromised to ensure that the word is completely accurate. We are at the mercy of the judgement of the translator.

 

I'm aware of SIGNIFICANT changes that were made as long ago even as in St. Jerome's translation from the Hebrew to the Latin. Safe to say that even though we know of changes in his text, they retain fidelity to the "rule of faith"... and he was so meticulous, and he documented his reasons for making the translations he did. His method was fascinating... (if you're ever looking for something awesome to read, check out the letters between St. Jerome and St. Augustine. They're actually entertaining, I was giggling most of the time that I read them because they'd argue like an old married couple :hehe2: ... but they tell you a great deal about St. Jerome's method of translation, too.)

 

Anyway, then you get to the Reformation and you get Luther's translation into the German vernacular... and we see evidence of him inserting new words to impose a fresh meaning on certain texts (a well-documented fact to which he admitted.) These changes are obviously LESS faithful. :lies:

 

And even if you look at the different translations in the same language - I mean, you've got your literal (such as the RSV) and your dynamic-equivalent (such as the Good News) and you've got a spattering of others that exist somewhere on the continuum in between (such as the NAB, or the Jerusalem Bible, etc.) Sometimes a passage in RSV compared with a Good News version of same will demonstrate that you can barely tell they're dealing with the same passage! The impact of our dependency on language cannot be emphasised enough!

 

Have you encountered the term 'anachronistic' before? In this context basically it means that we have an understanding of what a word means in the present-day, and we read something that was written hundreds of years ago, but we read it with our modern mind and impose our own meaning on the text as a result. The word as it existed hundreds of years ago meant something completely different. 

 

So you mix anachronism and different language all up together and an example of where we can go wrong is this:

 

Take the Greek word for power - δυναμις (which looks like dynamis if you write it with our alphabet) - its where we got the term 'dynamite' to describe the gunpowder innovation of the middle ages. But that doesn't mean that any time the word Î´Ï…ναμις is used in Scripture that it has reference to dynamite. Heck, no! Dynamite didn't even exist back then! It's so easy to slip up and have our own interpretation of things coloured by our modern view of the world. 

 

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So back to faith/religion/belief. 

I agree with blazingstar that faith and religion have evolved in meaning since the time that the Scriptures were composed. The nature of the word 'belief'? I'm not so sure I agree on that one. I also don't necessarily agree with your definition of that word. 

 

My understanding of the word 'belief' is that it corresponds to our apprehension of information which is not yet been proven conclusively to be true, i.e. to correspond with reality, but for which there is good reason to maintain that the information apprehended is not false i.e. counter to reality. Therefore it is not the same as knowledge, which refers to the apprehension of information that has been proven to correspond to reality. But it is POTENTIAL knowledge, that is, it may in the future be proven to be true. 

 

So in this sense, belief is that apprehension of information supplied by the tenets of a given religion which has not been conclusively proven. Faith in its truest sense is the supernatural virtue by which belief in what has been revealed to us is sustained.  

 

Religion, in its de facto sense today, certain refers to the institutionalisation of a set of beliefs as blazingstar has indicated above, but St. Thomas Aquinas also tells us that there is a VIRTUE called Religion, too. I've written more than enough, so I recommend looking at the Summa's treatment of the virtues for more information there. 

[Catherine Therese]

:photo: I'm sorry. That was WAY too long.  :paperbag:

[Apotheoun]

The Greek word δυναμις is still used in Eastern Christian theology. It is one of four words used to talk about the chain of being within the Godhead.