Believing Allegiance

Read Hebrews 11

Notes from Shawn

'Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. '

Hebrews 11:1

I think today when we read the Bible, we misinterpret the word “faith”. Faith can be interpreted in two ways. The first is the idea that you simply believe in a fact. For example, “I have faith in gravity” is a statement that you believe that the forces of gravity prevent things from floating around in the air. What you are acknowledging is the power of gravitational pull that keeps objects on the surface of the earth. It simply is affirming what you believe corresponds to reality. 

The other way to define faith is treating it as a pledge of loyalty. For example, “I have faith in my marriage” isn’t a statement of fact. It’s acknowledging you and your spouse are committed to the relationship. You both believe in your marriage as the result of both being ruthlessly committed to it. N.T. Wright says this about Paul’s use of the term “faith” (Greek word “Písti”) in the New Testament:

"Here we run into the kind of problem that meets all serious readers of Paul. One obvious Greek term for “loyalty” is one of Paul's favorite words, pistis, regularly translated “faith," but often carrying the overtones of "faithfulness," “reliability,” and, yes, "loyalty.” The word pistis could mean "faith” in the sense of “belief”- what was believed as well as the fact of believing, or indeed the act of believing, which already seems quite enough meaning for one small word. But pistis could also point to the personal commitment that accompanies any genuine belief, in this case that Jesus was now “Lord,” the world's rightful sovereign. Hence the term means “loyalty” or “allegiance." This was what Caesar demanded from his subjects.

For Paul, the word meant all of that but also much more. For him, this “believing allegiance” was neither simply a "religious” stance nor a “political” one. It was altogether larger, in a way that our language, like Paul's, has difficulty expressing clearly. For him, this pistis, this heartfelt trust in and allegiance to the God revealed in Jesus, was the vital marker, the thing that showed whether someone was really part of this new community or not."

-Paul: A Biography by N.T. Wright

I love Wright’s term “believing allegiance” to define faith. He goes on to talk about how pistis outside the New Testament is often used in first-century literature as a military term. It conveys the idea of radical loyalty in the way a soldier would serve his general unto death. What we see in Hebrews 11 is a list of the faithful who are radically devoted to God unto death. It was not just a list of people who believed in God as a spiritual reality or fact. Rather it's a list of people who reoriented their lives around joining God’s mission in the world. They gave up their comfort, dreams, hope, money, and anything that got in the way of following their general’s orders.

By all means, believe that faith means fact. It does and you need to believe the right facts and ideas about God. However, don’t allow your definition of faith to stop there. Biblical faith is deeper than that. Like the amazing list of people we find in Hebrews 11, let your faith be also defined by “believing allegiance”. Don’t just believe in your general’s existence, take his orders seriously.

(Shawn Prokes)