A History of Trust in God

Teresa Morgan is the McDonald Agape Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Yale Divinity School. In this interview, Morgan and Wayfare Editor Zachary Davis discussed how ideas of faith and trust have evolved in Christianity.

You have made a deep study of the history of the word faith. Tell us about the original meaning of this concept as understood by New Testament Christians.

Nowadays, when we talk about Christian faith, we likely think first about what we believe. Early Christians certainly believed things, but for them, belief was the basis for trust. Belief was foundational, but trust got you into the community of the saved and kept you there. Greek pistis and Latin fides are the terms that we translate as “faith” or “belief.” In the Greek and the Latin of their day, these terms meant trust, faithfulness, trustworthiness, entrustedness, or good faith. For very early Christians, pistis language centrally meant trust. It meant trust in God, trust in Christ, faithfulness to God in Christ. It meant the trust that God and Christ put in us. All the other things that we associate with faith now are evolutions out of that.

How were pistis and fides used before Christianity?

They were everywhere in society. They were used for the trust between family members, which was very positively viewed in the ancient world. They were also used for trust between friends. In the world of the first century, where Christianity developed, trust between friends was regarded as highly desirable but quite difficult. The terms were also used in commercial contexts for financial ‘credit’ and legal ‘trusts’, and in political contexts, of course—there was a lot of worry in the world of the first century about the trustworthiness of rulers, especially emperors. Emperors were generally regarded as not very trustworthy.

There was also a lot of interesting discussion about whether you could trust the gods. The world into which Christianity was born was a world, as far as we can tell, with very few atheists. Almost everybody just took for granted that the gods existed—the gods of Olympus, all the gods of the ancient world—but there was a lot of debate about whether you could trust them. They were often not trustworthy, and that’s one of the big differences between mainstream polytheism and Judaism and Christianity: for Jews and Christians, God is absolutely trustworthy, and that’s a huge new thing