Overview

In the church and its milieu, the word “faith” is used with sometimes irritating generality (the English word perhaps even more crassly than its German equivalent, Glaube). One can distinguish at least three uses, as well as two areas of scholarly inquiry.

In one of its uses, the term “faith” is almost synonymous with “religion”; it means essentially the basic personal disposition of individuals or communities. In analogy to “Christian faith,” we can speak also of “Jewish faith” and of the …