Equating 'faith' with 'belief'

. . . people were equating 'faith' with 'belief'. This is a recent aberration and one that is peculiar to modern Western Christianity. We do not find it in either Judaism or Islam. The Middle English 'bileven' meant 'love, trust, loyalty, and commitment' it was related to the German 'liebe' (beloved) and translated the Greek 'pistis' ('trust, commitment, engagement') in the New Testament and the Latin 'credo' which derived from 'cor do' ('I give my heart'). It was only in the late 17th century that 'belief' came to mean an intellectual assent to a rather dubious proposition. Karen Armstrong: Washington Post, On Faith, The Case for 'Faith', not 'Belief'

I enjoyed the episode of Global Spirit (2009) with Karen Armstrong and Robert Thurman. She wrote this column about the same time to explain why she wrote "The Case for God". I was very interested as she explained how this word, belief, had changed in meaning. When Jesus said, "Believe in me," she would say that he was inviting them to perform acts of compassion as their path in life.

A review in the Chicago Reader describes how Thomas Sheehan in his book, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity, made explicit his call for a radical shift from believing the right things about Jesus (orthodoxy) to doing the just and merciful things Jesus commanded (orthopraxis).

"Jesus proclaimed a loving Father who was already arriving among his people," he wrote, "a Father becoming immediately present to them. God, while remaining God, was reigning not from on high but in their justice, mercy and love for one another. What this means is that God becomes incarnate because of men and women, pours himself out and disappears into his people, and can be found nowhere else. With the incarnation, the separation of God and human persons disappears."