Politesse
Lux Aeterna
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2018
- Messages
- 12,114
- Location
- Chochenyo Territory, US
- Gender
- nb; all pronouns fine
- Basic Beliefs
- Jedi Wayseeker
Point of history:
Even online dictionary definitions have shifted to reflect common usage. Faith practically being synonymous with trust and confidence, etc. It's quite odd.
That's not the change. The idea that faith and trust are separate contexts is the change, a product of the changing philosophical and scholarly trends in European tradition. Faith, in Christian contexts, does and always did mean a personal relationship of loyalty and mutual trust/obedience; it is a translation of the ancient Greek term pistis, which held both meanings, likewise its Latin equivalent fides from which the English term is etymologically derived. They often were used in civil contexts to indicate legal relationships; for instance, a viceroy had the "faith" of his king, and something similar was being implied about Christ and his followers in relation to God, that they were adopted sons of God and therefore had the faith of and in God, a reciprocal relationship of faith and authority. No one predating the Renaissance ever talked or wrote about faith as though it were synonymous with "acceptance of a philosophical proposition". But cultures and priorities change over time. That new definition came to sit alongside the older sense of the word connoting trust and confidence, and both senses have been used (often interchangeably) in religious circles and secular contexts from the end of the Renaissance onward to the present. Four hundred years is a long time, and both definitions are commonly in use in our society at this point.
I wasn't disputing that the word 'faith' has been, and still is used in multiple ways, synonymous with trust, confidence, etc, just that this semantic drift creates sufficient ambiguity to allow theists to align and defend their faith, a belief held without the support of evidence, with trust or confidence.....which are not the same, thereby muddying the water.
I agree that the water is muddy, just not with your chronology of the concept. The ambiguity was always there, not of recent invention.