In a recent thread that isn't much related to this one, Sam wrote:

>(1) If God manifests himself to you in some sort of undeniably divine form, how is your following of Him based in faith rather than proof, faith being the basis for our relationship with God.

I always feel compelled to pick this nit. Faith has been much maligned in the last century and a half, and has taken on a meaning it never had before, one the writers of the NT and OT never had in mind. "Faith" in this modern sense is used to mean blind credulity, or belief without any proof. For a precise definition of the way the Bible uses faith, look in Hebrew 11.1, where faith is defined as "the evidence of things not seen." Many modern readers try to force that definition into its reverse, so that "faith" is the known part and "evidence of things not seen" is what is being defined. If they use the modern misdefinition, they often come to the wrong conclusion that the only evidence of things not seen that we need is believing without proof. It ain't so, and the verse says exactly the opposite. "Faith," in this case, is the part that is being defined, and "evidence of things not seen" is the definition. Biblical faith requires evidence because it *is* the evidence. Less abstractly, you trust ("have faith in") a person because he or she has consistently shown him- or herself to be worthy of that trust. You tend not to trust people whom you know nothing about. Relationships with God are the same way. Biblical faith is independent of feelings or attitudes, whereas the modern misdefinition depends completely on the emotions of the person.

This is one of those misconceptions that people tend not to notice often, because we just assume that our culture has the correct definition of its words, and so we often try to read that definition backwards, even though such a position is unsupported Biblically. Here's another reference that only makes sense with the proper definition of faith. In 2 Corinthians 5.7, Paul wrote, "We live by faith, not by sight." Try substituting the definition for the word: "We live by evidence of things not seen, not by sight." Now that is certainly theologically correct. God has given us plenty of evidence, but none of us alive have actually seen Jesus.

gab"Attribute mistakes to my writing this at 1 am"by