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Incidentally the novelty you're finding here is reflective of a split in Christianity.
In Western Christianity, 'faith' has become somewhat conflated with 'belief', i.e. a sort of propositional system where one evaluates a statement and says "Yes I think that's true" or "No I don't."
The New Testament says that "Faith without works is dead", which has caused much consternation in the West. Which is it? Believing a proposition or performing actions? What 'saves' us?
In Eastern Christianity, faith is understood to have much less to do with propositional belief and more to do with action. Let me explain my perspective here a little.
Faith is acting as though something is true despite not knowing for sure. When you sit in a chair it might buckle and injure you, but you're operating in faith that it won't. When the plan is for someone to pick you up at a minor rural airport at 10PM with no other transportation options available, you're engaging in faith by showing up expectantly, even if he might have forgotten or died in an accident along the way.
To have faith in Christ is to behave as though following Him should be your highest priority. To believe that but act otherwise is to break faith. Make sense? As the Bible says, even the demons believe that Christ is who He says He is.
It would be too great a digression to go into Orthodox theology a la Palamas but long story short I think it's basically correct to say that all propositions re: God are approximations and therefore necessarily partly incorrect. There's not really anything that I intellectually think is 'true' about God, because all truth about God is beyond mortal understanding.
To be a Christian requires some (possibly temporary) dogmatic intellectual belief, yes, but of surprisingly few propositions, and those universally of the sort that we might call unfalsifiable. But the much greater part of being a Christian is acting accordingly. Go to the liturgy. Receive communion in the hope that it's actually doing something. Confess your failings and strive your hardest to be more Christlike.
Like passion in a marriage, belief comes and goes. But love is a choice, and faith is always on the table.
This was really beautiful, and actually inadvertently addressed something I was writing in a different comment to you (started on my computer, left the apartment, will finish later).
Great stuff! Now to find something to have faith in...
Well, maybe sit with it a bit. But always happy to talk.
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