Concept

Faith

Intro

What does the Bible actually mean by "faith"? Most people today, Christian and non-Christian alike, hear the word and picture believing something even though you have no good reason to. That is the picture Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists made famous, and a lot of Christians have just gone along with it.

But that is not what the New Testament writers meant. The Greek word they used, pistis, was an everyday word in the marketplace. It meant trust: the kind of trust that backs a business deal, or the loyalty of a friend, or the credit a banker extends because he has good reason to think you will pay him back. It is closer to "I trust you" than to "I believe in spite of the evidence."

Biblical faith has three pieces that go together:

Content you can state in words (who Jesus is, what He did).
Agreement that this content is true (not just hearing it but actually accepting it).
Personal trust that throws your weight on it, the way you trust a chair to hold you when you sit down.

Jesus Himself never asked anyone to believe without reason. He pointed to His miracles ("if you don't believe Me, believe the works"). The apostles pointed to eyewitnesses of the resurrection. Hebrews 11, the famous "faith chapter," calls faith assurance and conviction, words borrowed from the courtroom, not from wishful thinking.

This page lays out the biblical picture, the classical three-part structure the Reformers spelled out, the standard skeptical objection ("faith is belief without evidence") and how to answer it, and where the great Christian thinkers, Augustine, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Plantinga, have located faith in relation to reason.

In full

A search-landing page for the question of what "faith" means in Christian theology. Christian faith is not belief without evidence and not wishful thinking, both are caricatures the New Atheist polemic has popularized and Christians have sometimes accepted by default. Biblical pistis is trust-based-on-warrant: a response to a Person who has made Himself known, formed in the will and affections as well as the intellect, rationally accountable but not reducible to inference.

Biblical Picture, pistis

The Greek pistis (and its verb pisteuō) carries the semantic field of trust, fidelity, faithfulness, persuasion, conviction. In commercial Greek it meant a guarantee, a pledge, a credit-extending trust. In NT use:

Trust in a Person, Rom 4:3 (Abraham trusted God); John 14:1 ("trust in God, trust also in Me"); Acts 16:31.
Faithfulness / fidelity, Rom 3:3 (the "faithfulness of God"); Gal 5:22 (fruit of the Spirit, pistis); Rev 2:10 ("be faithful unto death").
Settled conviction grounded in evidence, Hebrews 11.1 ("faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen"). The Greek terms here (hypostasis, elenchos) are juridical / evidentiary, not wishful.

The "things hoped for" of Hebrews 11.1 are not anchorless hopes, Heb 11 traces them through Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the prophets: people who acted on what God had spoken to them. Faith presupposes a Word given and a track-record of fidelity. It is response, not invention.

The Reformation three-aspect structure

Classical Protestant theology (going back to the Reformers and codified in 17th-century scholastic theology) distinguishes three aspects of saving faith:

Notitia, content known. There is propositional content faith trusts (who Jesus is, what He did, why it matters). Faith without content is empty, it has to be faith that-something-is-true before it can be faith in someone.
Assensus, intellectual assent. The propositional content is held to be true. James 2:19 reminds the reader that even the demons get this far ("the demons also believe, and tremble"), assent alone is not yet saving faith.
Fiducia, personal trust. The will commits itself to the One the content is about. This is the throwing-yourself-on element: the act of resting in Christ for salvation rather than in oneself.

Saving faith is all three. Modern evangelicalism has at times collapsed faith into fiducia alone (the "personal relationship" without doctrinal content) or into assensus alone (assenting to a creed without trust). Both are partial.

Common Objection, "Faith is belief without evidence"

The dominant skeptic objection, popularized by the New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens). The claim, steel-manned: religious "faith" names exactly the move of believing something because you want it to be true in the absence of, or against, the evidence. It is the opposite virtue from science's "follow the evidence wherever it leads." A Christian saying "I have faith" is admitting they do not have warrant. (Sometimes added: cf. Mark Twain, "faith is believing what you know ain't so.")

Response

This is not the biblical meaning of pistis. The dictionary use of "faith" in popular English ("I have faith my team will win") has drifted from the NT term. The defense is not to find a clever third meaning but to retrieve the actual one.
Jesus and the apostles consistently appeal to evidence in calling for faith. John 10:38, "though you do not believe Me, believe the works." Acts 17:31, God has given "assurance to all men" of the coming judgment by raising Christ from the dead. 1 Cor 15:3-8, the resurrection witness list as the basis on which "faith" stands.
The New Atheist definition is stipulative, not descriptive. Dawkins simply defines faith as evidence-less belief and then attacks his own definition, a textbook strawman. The serious Christian tradition (Aquinas; the Reformers; Edwards; Plantinga) has always held faith to be reasonable. See Faith is Belief Without Evidence Objection Defeater for the full unpacking.
Every worldview has foundational commitments held without strict inferential warrant, the reliability of induction, the trustworthiness of memory, the existence of other minds, the value of evidence itself. Atheist epistemology has its own "where do you start" problem. See Stealing from God Argument for the broader move. Calling Christian faith "irrational" while exempting the atheist's first-order trust commitments is special pleading. See Epistemic Standards for Theism.
Fiducia requires a step the inference does not, committing the will to a Person. That is not a leap over the evidence; it is a response to it, of a kind appropriate to relational warrant. You do not deduce trust in a friend; you do not start with neutral data and infer "this person loves me." But trust is not therefore irrational.

Wider Christian-tradition spread

Augustine / Anselm, "faith seeking understanding." Believing in order to understand. Credo ut intelligam. Faith and reason are not antagonists; they cooperate.
Aquinas, faith as assent to revealed truths. The articles of faith exceed what natural reason can demonstrate but do not contradict it. Reason can show the preambles of faith (e.g., God exists); revelation gives what reason cannot reach (Trinity, Incarnation).
Reformers, sola fide. Justification by faith alone, where faith is fiducia, the empty hand that receives Christ's righteousness.
Kierkegaard, the "leap of faith." Faith as a passionate, decision-laden commitment that goes beyond what reason alone can secure. Often misread as anti-rational; Kierkegaard is anti-rationalist about the kind of knowing love and commitment involve, not anti-reason about the existence of warrant.
Reformed Epistemology (Plantinga). Belief in God is properly basic, warranted not by inferential argument from prior premises but by the proper functioning of cognitive faculties (the sensus divinitatis) in the presence of God. See Reformed Epistemology.
Presuppositionalism (Van Til, Bahnsen). Christian commitments are presupposed in any coherent reasoning at all; the question is not whether to reason from foundational commitments but which ones. See Presuppositionalism.

Key Passages

Gen 15:6, Abraham's faith reckoned as righteousness (cited Rom 4:3)
Hebrews 11.1, "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen"
Hebrews 11.6, "without faith it is impossible to please Him"
Rom 1:17, "the righteous shall live by faith"
Rom 4:1-25, Abraham's faith
Rom 10:17, "faith comes by hearing"
Eph 2:8-9, "by grace... through faith... not of yourselves"
John 20:24-29, Thomas; "blessed are those who have not seen yet have believed" (often misread as anti-evidence; in context, a statement about future believers who rely on apostolic testimony rather than their own resurrection-appearance)
James 2:14-26, faith without works is dead
1 Cor 15:3-8, the evidential basis on which faith rests
1 Pet 3:15, "always be ready to give an answer (apologia)", built into the same NT vocabulary as faith

Faith is Belief Without Evidence Objection Defeater, the head-on rebuttal
Reformed Epistemology, Plantinga's framework for warranted Christian belief
Presuppositionalism, the Van Til / Bahnsen approach
Foundationalism, the classical-foundationalist epistemology pistis-as-trust is held against
Stealing from God Argument, every worldview presupposes commitments; the move neutralizes the "you have faith, I have reason" framing
Epistemic Standards for Theism, what counts as evidence, and what level of warrant is fair to demand
Faith and Reason, the broader concept page on the relation
Apologetics, the discipline of giving reasons for the faith