Faith

Faith believes in what God has done, what he can do, and what he’s going to do. In the OT, it is the word hÎn…wmTa that is the relevant Hebrew word and used primarily to designate truth, honesty, and loyalty. The hiphil form of NAmDa designates trust and obedience, which are the appropriate responses to YHWH’s faithfulness. Abraham is praised for trusting in YHWH while Isaiah attributed Israel’s exile to their lack of faith and pleaded with them to once again trust in YHWH’s divine deliverance. In the NT, the primacy of faith relates to persuasion or conviction in the new covenant that was foreshadowed in the OT. Faith was presented more as loyalty to Torah, which was loyalty to YHWH; however, in the NT it takes on more diversity and contributes to the variety of later developments in Christian theology. Dr. Avery Dulles, a Presbyterian who converted to Catholicism, developed 7 models for how theologians tend to understand faith: propositional (assent to revealed truths on God’s authority), transcendental (new cognitive perspective given by God-thus, less propositional), fiducial (emphasizes trust), affective-experiential (emphasizes faith’s relation to experience), obediential (emphasizes God’s sovereign initiative), praxis (emphasizes hopeful action in solidarity with suffering), and personalist (emphasizes personal relationship conferring a new model of life and excludes cognition in defining faith) models.