O to Believe!!!

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  (John 3:16)

John 3:16 falls off the loose lips of "Christians" looking to bolster their own campaigns for a seating capacity in heaven that their own God seems to have mistakenly evaluated.  Usually this verse is used to "evangelize" by argument those who are skeptical of the Jesus the church seems to protect itself from by domestication.  What the church has oftentimes failed to realize, however, is that its own "Christians" do not really spend enough time reading the Bible other than to pick out favorite scriptures to endear themselves to God and to condemn the world that God so loved, into the fiery furnace.  But God loved the world so much that he sent Jesus into it.

Our real concern in today's lesson is to consider what it means to believe as a person connected with the church.  Douglas Harper makes mention that the 14th century really brought forth a change in how the terms believe and faith had been historically used in the world and the church, and how emerging trends from that period have, in many ways, flipped the way we understand the terms, and thus have, to a very large extent, kept our comprehension of biblical texts such as this one elementary at best.  Here is what Harper says of the term belief:

Belief used to mean "trust in God," while faith meant "loyalty to a person based on promise or duty" (a sense preserved in keep one's faith, in good (or bad) faith in common usage of faithful, faithless, which contain no notion of divinity).  But faith, as cognate of L. fides, took on the religious sense beginning in 14c. translations, and belief had by 16c. become limited to "mental acceptance of something as true," from the religious use in the sense of "things held to be true as a matter of religious doctrine" (early 13c.)

The modern world has really pulled the wool over the eyes of the church.  The point being made here is that belief and believe, thus are probably best understood as relational terms in our English translations of the Bible.  To believe in God is to have trust in God - to build a relationship with the Divine.  To have faith, at least in that transitionally medieval outlook is to be solidly connected to a family unit, friendship, household, guild, or something else involving person-to-person relationship building.  To that end, for the Christian to believe something is caught in a difficult world because of the ways in which the definitions of these words have adapted and changed and evolved.  But, it seems definitely more appealing to read John 3:16 through the lens of those believing in God (growing in relationship with God) inheriting eternal life, rather than developing a theology about people's academic or philosophical pursuits in relation to whether they offer their mental acceptance or not to the possibility of God in their own life.  I say this because, as Genesis says,

Abram believed YHWH, and he credited it to him as righteousness.  (Gen. 15:6)

The relationship between Abram (who would become Abraham) and YHWH (the name of God) came to a point where Abram's loyalty to YHWH was tested and when the bonds between the two were deemed strong enough by YHWH, it was credited to Abram as righteousness.  That means these two brothas was tight, yo!  It wasn't that Abram was perfect, but that Abram was good to YHWH, and YHWH appreciated the love.