Chapter 4: The Lie of Faith

12/24/2023The Angry Preacher

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Faith vs Pisteo

That’s why it’s so hard to get this one correction across to anyone. The original root word in the New Testament versions and the Septuagint is pisteo and its conjugations follow this root. In every single usage in the bible is a verb, and we translate it in our mind as a noun because that is how our language has been constructed in grammar and syntax both as a noun almost since the very first translations of the bible. Theologians throughout the centuries have known this mistranslation exists it is incredibly difficult to get people to understand and adopt the proper usage. But because of how English is constructed in this fundamental and logical way, it causes cognitive dissonance when we use verbs as nouns. Who’s been lying to us? The Father of Lies of course. It is fundamentally impossible to address any kind of spiritual warfare or even the idea that Christianity has been twisted without addressing this one important concept.

If you ever need evidence as to how subtle and pervasive spiritual attacks by the enemy are, you don’t really have to look any further. I’ve explained this concept to people who have grown up in the church like myself or even been to advanced bible schools and they were just flabbergasted thoroughly. And then almost immediately we are confronted with the need to communicate something about faith in English again and all of us use it wrong without thinking about it and it just reinforces the wrong usage in our own brains. It’s so subtle that our own thoughts betray us even after we agree to the correct definition. It takes a lot of practice to rewrite those little brain cells where language is concerned. It’s reinforced by the very language we speak and think in.

This is an instance where a word in Greek being translated into English does NOT have a one-to-one translation. There is no single word in English that can convey the concept that Pisteo means. It requires a paragraph to explain the concept so it needs to be embedded in us like muscle memory. Whenever we hear it in English and in context we need to automatically understand that its usage is wrong. Not correcting it every single time, even if it’s just in our own mind, is reinforcing the wrong meaning, but if we just take a moment to consider what they are saying in the correct context before agreeing with it it can help build new brain muscle memory.

If you go to a modern Greek speaker they’ll still explain it to you like this. This is what it meant then, and it’s still very close even now. It not only makes all the stories in the bible that we are familiar with new again, but it makes many of the contradictions and confusion in the bible that non-Christians talk about just vanish. Try it, and the non-Christians will actually argue with you that you are wrong about what Faith means. The non-Christian will actually argue with you and tell you you’re wrong in support of the mainstream messages of Christianity that everyone is comfortable with.

Here is how it was explained to me:

Even the early church translators and copiers in the Dark Ages have struggled with translating this word in a way that makes sense when translated to any language we’re familiar with. At the time they were more concerned with Latin, but as translating it went to English it became an even larger problem. The problem wasn’t just trying to find a single word, or even a small enough phrase to make it usable, the larger problem was trying to make the sometimes complex concepts surrounding the gospel work.
Faith is an important part of understanding the gospel. In fact, the entire concept is indispensable. The entire bible is divided into two parts, the old contract, and the new contract. The old contract between man and God was that anything you did that separated you from God could be fixed with appropriate sacrifices, alms, or works that could cleanse the transgression. The new contract was that you could bypass all that with faith. So you can see how important it is. A mistranslation of the word faith could seriously derail the entire thing. Trying to make several books, letters, or testimonies, written by several authors dozens of years apart, all work together in a cohesive manner that would deliver a unified and consistent message cannot work if this concept is changed, even slightly.
Today, it’s even worse because of how the word is commonly used and understood by everyone in every language being forced to coexist nearby. Like a game of telephone, the constant translation back and forth through different languages and cultures just reinforces the use of Faith as a noun.
As it’s used it means your belief. It’s entirely mental. When we acknowledge that it’s a verb, we are happy to think about it, but as soon as we go back to talking to others about it we begin using it as a noun again. Our brain notices the difference and soon abandons the idea of it being a verb because we sound like idiots if we try to use it as a verb in conversation. It sounds like bad grammar.
When we try to use it like a verb, it comes out as believing. And if we believe in something different than what the group considers wrong or unintelligent, it becomes a simple difference of opinion that can be corrected. Thus all arguments about Christianity nowadays are arguments about someone’s intelligence, or even sanity. In fact, you can open the diagnosis manual for the American Psychiatric Association, known as the DSM, right now, and find a disorder diagnosis for believing that God actually talks to people or has any influence on reality.
That’s where we are. Now let me tell you where it went wrong.
Faith, the concept of the noun that we don’t have an English word for is pisteo, and we translate it as belief or believing.

The actual concept has three parts. Action based upon belief, sustained by confidence that that, which is believed, that you’re acting on is true. Not that you believe it’s true, that the action you are taking based on this belief is true, AND that you confidently risk everything in that action.

You can hardly ruin a word better than that.

I often use an example of sitting in a chair as an example.
If someone says the word chair to me, I automatically know that this thing they are talking about will keep my butt off the ground. I don’t even have to see it to assume that.
When I do see it, I can make judgments about it, if it’s sturdy or designed properly. After I decide it is built sturdy and strong enough to keep my butt off the ground, that’s called trust. But note I have to examine it to move from belief to trust. And there is a chance I could examine it and decide it won’t keep my butt off the ground. Trust requires examination and a decision or judgment. Belief only requires an idea, only a mental understanding of an idea.
But faith is even more than trust. If all you are doing is examining Christianity and deciding it will fix your problems or give you a better life, then you are trusting it – but you aren’t acting faith, it’s still not an action, it’s still not faithing.
When you walk over to the chair and start to bend your knees, extending your weight to the point that you let go of your body and it settles into the chair, trusting that the chair will keep you off the ground, then that’s faith. of faithing, to make a verb out of it.
Today, before the sun goes down you will use the word faith as a noun again. Reinforcing the noun concept in your brain and eliminating what you just learned.

You can’t help it. I can’t help it. It just happens. So I’ve heard some suggest we change the word, at least for this conversation. In English, you can change a noun into a verb by adding -ing. Like ball is a noun, balling is a verb. So we say faithing.
But even that doesn’t work too good for various reasons, not the least of which is that we aren’t correcting the old usage, we are adding another word, another concept, and we are still using and thinking in terms of the old one.

This, right here, this difficulty to change such a small and subtle thing, this is the heart and soul of the spiritual warfare Christianity is supposed to be engaged in. it’s a lie that is so pervasive and self-reinforcing that it can only be referred to as diabolical. Directed so easily by the King of lies.

Forget what some mass murderer did, if what I’m saying is true then this is a massively well-planned, executed attack that took the course of centuries, reinforcing itself over the millennia as new languages and cultures were created, orchestrated to be self-correcting like a computer program’s error control, and largely running by itself, reinforced not only by other humans around you but by your very mind and language you use itself.

That’s the definition of diabolical.

When I first examined this and decided I was going to adopt it for a short time as an experiment, I was actually shocked at how impossible it was to change. It was very easy to go through the bible and various biblical concepts like the gospel and readdress them with this new concept. It was amazing how much of the bible suddenly made so much more sense, I came to the gestalt that this right here made the good news actually good news. But what was shocking was how many Christian friends I lost. How violently people rebelled against the idea, and how disgustingly the people of forgiveness persecuted me.

So Let’s rehash. the word faith in the New Testament, every single time, means an action based on belief and sustained by confidence.

It has to have all three. There has to be a belief that I’m acting on. There has to be confidence in that action to the point that I’m hanging everything on it like it’s the truth of the universe, kinda like hanging on a cross. The idea I’m believing and acting on has to be true, and I have to keep it up no matter what life throws at me.

This is the magic that moves mountains. Belief alone accomplishes nothing.

But there’s more.

It goes back to how Greek differs from English in grammar and semantical issues. Greek is amazingly more precise than English. In a survey of world languages, English is a young simple language.

In grammar, you have to figure out not just what a word means. That’s vocabulary. In Grammar, there are rules of logic, just like the decision trees of a computer algorithm. If this, then that. If not, then something else. It has been a Christian belief since I was paying attention in grade school 50 years ago, that Jesus came in the fullness of God’s time. God chose the time of his revelation on purpose. This includes when everything was the best most perfect moment politically, economically, etc. Also, when the common Koine Greek was the lingua franca, like English is now, or French was a few generations back. You can go to overseas schools in medicine or finance or technology and they’ll still teach in English. You can see in the military today we are still using French words from the Napoleonic era like artillery, infantry, grenade, etc.
That’s how accepted and pervasive and understood Greek was back then. So much so, that the Jews got together and translated their sacred texts for thousands of years into Greek, and they took it seriously.
They took it so seriously that they put together 70 Hebrew scholars who were hugely and widely respected to sit together and work together on this translation and take as long as they needed to do it. The whole Jewish world would be happy to accept their results. It was a great thing.
We call it the Septuagint. The name reflects the number 70, Septua… It was accepted and used in common grade school education as well as advanced rabbinical studies all over the Jewish world. It was the bible that Jesus and the disciples learned from and used as it came out years before then.
It was very precise. More precise than the Hebrew language or the Aramaic language that the Old Testament books had been in before this. In fact, the words used in those languages could be translated as “young woman” who would conceive a miracle, it was the preciseness of the Greek that allowed us to specifically demonstrate that it was “virgin”.
So I believe this was a part of what God meant when He says Jesus came in the fullness of time.
Furthermore, I believe that there is a subset of Greek words that God reached out and took ownership of, and even now unto today, they have special meanings specific to Christianity. In ancient Greek philosophy, they had the concept of a mediator between you and your personal God or Themus, which they had a word for: logos. As I’m sure you’ve seen in modern times, logos has come to refer to Jesus, the one we consider our mediator between us and God. We no longer need to go through the animal sacrifices and stand with a veil between us and God, because Jesus did what all those things were supposed to be for.

Likewise, in Christianity when the bible refers to Pisteo it only refers to an action when the belief is that God is true, that He does what He says, and keeps His promises.
The truth is, without this concept, you can faith all the time about anything. When you get up in the morning, you don’t even think about gravity, you put your feet on the floor instead of the ceiling because you faith gravity. You heard my earlier example about faithing chairs.
We have to restrict faithing to God to make this concept or definition of Faith make sense. Because that is also how the people who wrote the bible are using it.
In Greek in the Bible, you will also see the word apistis. The prefix ‘a’ means against, or more specifically ‘in the opposite direction’. We still use it today in several common words like asexual. I’m not going to make any comment about why asexual is a common word. I’m sure with the news today you’ve heard this word, that’s what the ‘a’ in the front means, it changes the word to mean the opposite direction of the word.

So everything we faith, that is not related to God’s words or promises, is called apistis in the bible. It doesn’t mean it’s wrong or a sin, it’s just how Greek grammar works. Don’t believe that if the bible calls something apistis, it’s against God or a sin, that’s not what the word means. It simply means this is not what we mean when we call some action pistis.

All science is based on faith.

I know there are few science lovers who will admit this, but scientists know this is true.
The most basic faith premise is: that whatever has been, will continue to be. whatever way things have worked will continue to work that way.
The entire concept of carbon 14, which all of our timeline of history and how old things are we dig up out of the ground is based on this assumption. Science knows that the decay rate of carbon 14 changes based on things like atmospheric content. Science also knows that the Earth’s atmosphere has changed over millions of years. But the carbon 14 dating assumes it’s always been constant. That’s faithing. Or, afaithing, rather. It’s not evil or a sin, it’s helped us understand our world and the universe. The girl, the gold watch, and everything. afaithing, or apistis doesn’t equal sin. It’s just a description of a natural law or force, like gravity, and the ‘a’ simply means it’s different from Acting with confidence on the truth of God’s promises.

Faithing is not a choice, it’s required for life. The only choice is the object of the faithing. It can be good or bad or anywhere on the spectrum between those two.
The famous theologian Reinhold Niebuhr gives an example where he compares all of us to myopic people. We don’t have a choice of needing glasses to see properly, but we can choose what kind of glasses. He wrote a good dissertation on this subject.

We are like the myopic man. You cannot function in life without faith, no more than myopic people can function without glasses.

And the idiots of this world are those who say you can, who are too dumb to know the frame of reference that controls their actions. They don’t even know they’ve not even analyzed it. They just go with the flow. They just put their feet on the floor, never considering what might happen if one morning gravity stops working.

But not going with the flow is not a functional option, the flow does exist, and you’re either controlled by it or if you’re an intelligent person, you know what your frame of reference is and what the controlling priorities are and the glasses are those faith premises.

But the circular relationship is if you put a set of glasses on, no matter how you went about making the choice of a custom pair for your vision or a pair you found in a drawer, If you stumble over every step, bang your elbow, your shoulder, as you go through every door after a while, you’re gonna question the glasses and take them off, then reassess and put them back on again. But if you see more clearly, maybe not perfectly, But the glasses help align your path, then you grow in confidence that you have the right glasses.

That’s why you can’t separate faith from experience.

It’s a circular positive feedback loop. Your faithing produces experience, which reinforces your faithing.

You have a choice, get on this bumpy train of time or grab hold of God’s promises. And even if apparent collisions between the circumstances of time and what God has said are occurring, You’re going with God’s promises forever.

Do you know what supernatural means? More natural. Super is just a prefix, like ‘a’ in the earlier example, which means ‘more’.
The most natural person in relationship to God ever to walk the face of this earth was Jesus of Nazareth. That’s the point. The Bible is a collection of testimonies from witnesses who tell us who He was and how He faithed.

If we follow the logic so far, we can apply this to history as well. The Vikings afaithed. The Romans afaithed. From whole societies to individual villages, battles were fought and you better believe they all had in their mind that their god was stronger than their opponent’s god. It’s all over historical literature. The crisis of afaith in historical conflict is an archetype, a trope throughout literature and TV and movies and novels. It wasn’t considered sophisticated or evolved to live without faithing, if they came across someone who didn’t bring God into it it would be alien to them.

It’s a part of who we are down to the biological level. There’s proof of this all around us in America today. The screaming woke protestors, the single Viking holding a bridge against an army, the 300 at Thermopylae, and the crusaders or Muslim suicide bombers or samurai all faithed. Just the object, or premise, of the belief they were acting on allowed a confidence unto self-sacrifice that makes their actions heroic to the culture they are a part of, and we have to admit their actions are grudgingly impressive even if they are the enemy to us.

Why then is this concept of faith important, and why am I including it in a book that demonstrates we might be wrong about some of our Christian beliefs. I just spent three videos showing that even the bible has some beliefs that Christians and non-Christians alike are just assuming are true, but demonstrably false. And now I’m switching to an explanation of the concept of Pisteo and how it’s not the same thing as the word faith we use?

Well, It’s because the last three chapters or videos were a prelude. Now I’m going to transition to the actual proposition.

So before you go to dismantle Christianity, I would like to point out that I’m not trying to dismantle it. I’m trying to return us to what it originally was because I believe this country and the Christianity in it is in serious trouble. I’ll explain this in the chapters to come, but it’s important to note I’m not trying to destroy anything without presenting a replacement. And that replacement starts with this concept of Faith. Every contradiction in the bible, every argument I’ve ever heard against it, every little deviation in the message that has spawned a hundred denominations, all of it is eliminated by using this concept to view the message in the bible. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to trust the bible logically despite all the honest heart-felt arguments against it that are so common now?

So in this new view, what does God want? What does it all mean? How can I possibly say that He is not as concerned with you obeying all the laws as you or your church may be?

I’m not saying our behavior is unimportant. What I’m saying is that using the adherence to the set of laws to justify who’s saved or favored by God is the problem, and has been the argument of the enemy since Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments.

God’s looking for one thing.

That’s why this foundation is so important. God has got perfection all around him, angels flying around him every day. What God wants is trust.

What do you want from your Children? Parents? What do you want from your loved ones? Perfection or trust? Trust.

Perfection is something you keep working on. Trust is either there or it isn’t.

What do you want from your lover? What do you want from your wife? What do you want from your husband?

What’s the greatest blow that can be given to a loving relationship. Nothing matches infidelity or breach of trust.

we’re constituted, we have the image of God in us. The good side of us recognizes instantly we want trust. Well, that’s as close as you will probably ever get to having a feeling akin to God because that’s what He wants.

He created Adam and Eve and gave them everything. they trusted The father of lies and disbelieved God and lost everything. and all through the whole record of God’s drama, dealing with the choosing of one man and the choosing of one people to be the custodians of His revelation and the sending of that one perfect one to teach us what God is looking for was to repair that relationship.

We can’t do it. No matter how many laws we don’t break, no matter how successful we are, no matter how many people in church agree with us, no matter how much a preacher agrees with us or is proud of us, nothing that we do can repair that relationship. And I’d like to point out that no matter how many of those laws we do break, no matter how homeless or poor we are, no matter how many churches don’t accept us, no matter how many preachers argue with us or cast judgment on us it’s just as futile. all of those things are us, they are our judgment of each other, they are us comparing ourselves to others to demonstrate how better of a Christian we are, and how we are more saved than others.

It’s all filthy rags. None of it matters for those reasons. They matter. They matter for other reasons. But if you are doing them for the wrong reasons, then you’re in a pretty powerful delusion.

God wants faithing, not law keeping. And the best proof of that is in the story of Jesus himself.

I don’t understand the Trinity. I don’t even waste my time thinking about it. Show me where the disciples or first-century Christians even argued about it.

But if we use the simple revelatory terms of God; the Father God, the Son of God, and the holy ghost. Let me explain how Faithing repairs the relationship with God.

If we take the basis of the Nicene creed, which is the foundation of both the Eastern and Western Catholic and Protestant churches, Jesus was coequal.

He shed himself, took upon himself the form of a servant, and took our place. He shed His light, paid the price of redemption, and paid the price as our kinsman redeemer having been kin to us in flesh and blood by the virgin birth.

But all theology says he was one with the Father. Coequal.

Yet he shed all that to bring the revelation, which is the incarnation. And his good life does not save anybody. His good life bought the price of redemption, namely a perfect life. But he laid that life down for us.

All basic redemption Theology, Catholic and Protestant. and every record of the resurrection, Every single one.
read the book of Acts: It’s Peter’s first sermon on the day of Pentecost.

Ye have taken and with wicked hands have crucified and slain whom God hath raised up

two chapters later They’re trying to get Peter to shut up about the resurrection. He says you killed the prince of life and desired a murderer to be granted unto you. But God raised him up.

Every record has Jesus being raised by the Father.

Now, let’s assume you were coequal and just a rich earthly business partnership then you turn loose of it all on the promise that your partner would give it back.

If you’re gonna do that, I have beachside property in Arizona to sell you

Jesus as he screamed out in agony Those seven words of the cross: Father, oh my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

He who had never known darkness, he who had never known sin. He who had never been separated from the father. He who had never known the wrath of God against sin, stepped into that darkness. Took that separation, received to himself that anger, and was, as Paul says, obedient onto the death, even the scandalous death of the cross, wherefore God has raised him up.

He took the biggest risk with faithing of all time.

He emptied himself of heaven’s glory coequal with the Father took this path and died the sinner’s death in our place On the promise, one promise, we got a book full of them, He had the one promise, That on the third day, God would raise him up.

He trusted. That’s the point.

I don’t think your self-motivated changes towards self-righteousness, weigh an ounce with God. I don’t think that our efforts to imitate Christian behavior are anything other than chief imitations but to those who trust God, God has promised to put in us a new embryo of life.

He didn’t say you’d get it if you agreed to follow all the rules of any Jerusalem that is now, He didn’t say you had to believe every single comma and paragraph in the bible. He never said anything about conformity.

Parents, How do you feel when your little child, trusts you and acts accordingly? That’s what God’s looking for.

That’s why, as we saw in Job, He does all these cosmically powerful things for us but doesn’t need us one whit.

That’s not a church that condemns. It takes us all where we are and says the simple message: God is still looking for faithers that will take His word when their circumstances are crushing them. And we’ll say I’m going to hang my body on what God said and the circumstances be damned. I’m going to hang on if necessary by a fingernail till death.

Historically this message gets lost every few hundred years, obliterated by the traditions that make void God’s word.

More will be revealed.