On Faith and Trust

"If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all."- Isaiah 7:9

"It is commonly agreed that this utterance of the prophet is a (the?) pivotal text upon which the meaning of faith in the work of Isaiah and, indeed, in the entire Old Testament. Faith... is not a matter of intellectual content or cognitive belief. It is rather a matter of quite practical reliance upon the assurance of God in a context of risk where one's own resources are not adequate.... 

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy-- which guards cognitive formulations-- that those who enforce right belief seem most often themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust."

-- Walter Brueggemann, WBC Commentary on Isaiah, 67-68.