Faith? Belief? What’s the difference? Who owns them?

It’s common for people to distinguish between faith and belief, usually assigning the lesser of the two, belief, to one group, such as the Christians, and the greater, faith, to another group, such as the Jews. In Two Types of Faith, Martin Buber distinguishes between these two ways of relating to God without playing the game of My Religion Is Better Than Yours.  He contrasts the Hellenistic-inspired notion of faith as “mere believing,” that is, accepting the certainty of specific truths one had not previously held, with the Hebraic view of relational faith as trust, that is, depending on the “contact of my entire being with the one in whom I trust” (8). He refuses to identify faith as belief with Christians in general and faith as trust with Jews in general, arguing that both types of faith permeate both religions. He does argue, however,  that faith as belief finds its “representative actuality” in Christianity and faith as trust finds its “representative actuality” in Judaism (11-12).

Though I may quarrel with his last conclusion about “representative actualities,” my experience within and knowledge of Christianity and Judaism confirms his view that faith as belief and faith as trust run through both traditions (and more than likely through Islam as well). Faith as belief is part of both Christianity and Judaism. Christians have creeds, distillations of teachings that help people navigate the scriptures and contemporary philosophy rightly, and they recite many of them during their liturgies. So do Jews. The Sh’ma and  and Maimonides’s Thirteen Attributes of God are the most well known, but Saadia Gaon, Yehudah HaLevi, and others developed lists of beliefs to guide the faithful through the scriptures and contemporary intellectual challenges as well.  Whether formal or informal, universally or not universally accepted,  intellectual formulations of specific truths it is important to affirm or assent to--such as the unity of God and the goodness of the created world--play an essential, constructive  role in religious traditions. They complement faith as trust; they do not supplant it.  The faith that grounds and transforms the whole person must be mind and heart, truth and trust, emet v’emunah.

Faith as trust (emunah in Hebrew), Buber’s second type of faith, is also at the core of both Judaism and Christianity. The dominant understanding of faith in Christianity, before and after the Protestant Reformation,  is also trust, as Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and many others confirm. To call this talk of trust, as Buber does,  the survival of or a resurgence of “genuine Judaism” within Christianity seems incorrect and unnecessary. The 20th-century Reformed theologian H. Richard Niebuhr bypasses the notion of belief altogether to define faith as “radical trust in and loyalty to the One.”  In Jesus, Buber says, “the genuine Jewish principle of” faith is manifest (12).  I agree, but I would argue that in accepting Jesus as the Messiah, Christians did not merely believe him to be God: they adopted his way of being faithful to God, his way of trust. Faith as trust cannot be claimed primarily for one community of faith over the other.

I confess my great ignorance about the Islamic tradition. Yet from my reading and experience I would venture to guess that it, too, is pervaded by faith as belief and faith as trust.  The shahada (and much of Islamic theology) represents one side, the recurring note of faith as radical trust in the One (tawwakul) the other. Recently I came across a definition of faith by al-Hujwiri, the 11th century Persian Sufi saint, that plumbs the depths of this notion of faith as radical trust, trust that penetrates to the root of one’s being, unifies all of one’s being,  and requires the slaying of all rivals for our absolute trust: “Faith is really the absorption of all human attributes in the search of God.” (Revelation of the Mystery, tr. Reynold A. Nicholson, 289) 
What al-Hujwiri means by this he shows by telling a story he heard:

[W]hen Ibrahim Khawwas was asked [by the man narrating the story] concerning the reality of faith, he replied:  “I have no answer to this question.just now, because whatever I say is a mere expression, and it behooves me to answer by my actions; but I am setting out for Mecca: do thou accompany me that thou mayest be answered.” 
The narrator continues:  “I consented.  As we journeyed through the desert, every day two loaves and two cups of water appeared. He gave one to me and took the other for himself.  One day an old man rode up to us and dismounted and conversed with Ibrahim for a while; then he left us.  I asked Ibrahim to tell me who he was. 
He replied:  “This is the answer to thy questions.”
“How so"?” I asked.
He said: “This was Khidr [the enigmatic figure in Islam said to have guided Moshe to deeper wisdom and who continues to appear to guide and instruct people with his illuminated wisdom; roughly analogous to the legend of the Prophet Eliyahu in Judaism], who begged me to let him accompany me, but I  refused, for I feared that in his company I might put confidence in him instead of in God, and then my trust in God (tawwakul) would have been vitiated.  Real faith is trust in God.” (Ibid., 289-290)

Faith as trust and loyalty belongs to no religion, no tradition.  It is the way of living from the root of one’s being with the One.