Originally posted by FreakyKBH
I am suggesting that perhaps Neitzche used the word 'faith' when he intended to use the word 'belief,' as there is a distinction between the two.
Hi Freaky! Hope you and yours are all well.
I agree that faith ought not to be conflated with contemporary conventional usages of “belief” as what I “think” (or conclude or opine). A declaration of belief (e.g. a creedal statement) is not the same as a declaration of confidence in that belief. We hold beliefs with varying degrees of confidence. And that the confidence (faith), like the belief, stands in need of justification (speaking epistemically, here)—it cannot justify an epistemological claim.*
Nor should either one of them be conflated with “certainty”. One has faith—justifiable or not—in the face of absence of certainty. That faith, or confidence, is often what enables us to act in uncertain situations—even if it is just faith in the probabilities.
However—
I think this is a prime example of how theology (and soteriology) can change on the basis of (1) translation, and (2) changes over time in the meaning of the translated terms.
The KJV translated the active verb form
pisteo (literally, “I faith/trust”; not “I ‘have’ faith” ) to the English
believe; though, except for 2nd Thessalonians 2:13, they retained the noun “faith” for the Greek
pistis. At the time, “believe” was an understandable (if somewhat poetic) rendering of
pisteuo—
“Believing and loving are closely related. . . . [From the North Germanic galaubjan, which] meant ‘hold dear, love’ and hence ‘trust, believe’, and it was formed on a base, laub-, which also produced, by various routes, English
love,
lief ‘dear’,
leave ‘permission’, and the second element of
furlough.”
—John Ayto,
Dictionary of Word Origins.
When it comes to soteriology, old friend, you and I have pretty much always disagreed. But I think (believe) that any
soterios by “right thinking (belief/doctrine)” –is a very latter-day notion resulting from the changing conventional usage of a translated term. Although it is not absent from the RCC or the Orthodox churches, it seems stronger among Protestant groups that no longer look to early church tradition for exegetical clues (and who sometimes seem to have allowed translation to color the original, rather than the other way around).** [Those “seems” indicate that I have less “faith” in those particular thoughts. 😉 ]
In any event, basing one’s theology on the evolution of translated terms into new conventions of language would seem to be fraught with the risk of error (as is any tendency to arbitrarily translate a polysemous language into one’s preferred monosemous terms, and then to insist on them).
_____________________________________________________
* I understand that terms can take on different usages/meanings in different domains of discourse. If
pistis bears some “mystical” meaning in the NT, and according to this or that Christian doctrine, then
that meaning needs to be clearly stated, and justified.
** Then again, my Greek is not that extensive, and depending on how closely cognate are
pistis and
episteme, the confusion may go back fairly early in the church. I haven’t looked for some time, and would have to research, but I doubt that it would go back beyond, say, the third century. (The Latin Vulgate uses
fide for faith and
credere for “believe”.)
______________________________________________
EDIT: The fact that Nietzsche was raised in a strictly German Lutheran environment, and his father was the last in a long line of Lutheran pastors, gives some further creedence to HoH's point that Nietzsche probably knew the distinction, and chose his words with that in mind.
EDIT 2: Of course, we're not likely to get rid of particular usages and, e.g., replace "pillars of faith" with "justifiers of doctrine"; we just have to recognize the differences.
Faith as proof.
03 Jan '13 04:39
Back to Top