What is the difference between belief and faith, from a Protestant perspective? I want to know what is the difference between belief and faith from a Protestant perspective. Can anyone explain this to me?
The understanding that I am most familiar with - a Protestant understanding, if it matters, is that "belief" is an intellectual belief, while "faith" is a matter of trust that leads to action.

This can be summed up in an illustration of Charles Blondin, a  tightrope walker who asks a crowd if they believe that he can safely walk a wheelbarrow across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.  Many in the crowd ask who believes that he can do this, and of course, most say that they do.  Then he asks who is willing to get into the wheelbarrow.  Only those whose "belief" reaches the point of faith will get in.

This is similar to how it's explained by many, many, Christian groups, and while I can't claim that the understanding is universal, it is quite common.  For example, The Feral Apologist has an article explaining the difference here.  They put it like this:


  How are we, as Christians, to understand our faith? We need to first
  discover the meaning of the word “faith” in the Bible, and how that
  meaning is somewhat different from the meaning many attach to it
  today. To avoid the cultural baggage associated with the term, let’s
  look at the Greek words that are used in the New Testament and
  translated as “faith.” There are three primary forms of this word in
  Greek, the noun form pistis, the adjective form pistos, and the verb
  form pisteuo. Each form’s meaning is a variant of the word “trust.”
  Hence pistis is “a trust” in someone or something, pistos is
  “trusting” as applied to someone adjectivally, and pisteuo literally
  means “I trust.” It is important to keep this in mind because we have
  often misunderstood these words (translated as “faith”) in our culture
  to be, not variants of the word trust, but variants of the word
  belief, used in an intellectual sense. It is true that some places in
  scripture, such as James 2:19, the verb form is rightly translated as
  “believe” because of contextual issues and what James was trying to
  accomplish. In other places, such as John 14:1, a variant imperative
  form of the verb is translated as Jesus’ exhortation to “trust” in
  him. When we encounter the word “faith” in scripture then, our default
  understanding should be that it means “trust.”


Faith Baptist Church, in New jersey also uses the Blondin story in one of their devotionals on the subject. The devotional says this:


  The historical stunts of Blondin help us understand what it means to
  have "faith". First of all, faith is not mere intellectual assent. If
  anyone in the crowd truly believe that Blondin could cross the raging
  Niagara with someone in the wheelbarrow, he or she would have
  volunteered to ride along. "Faith" always means that we are really
  trusting someone or something. "Faith" is more than the words of
  mental assent as the words that were shouted by the crowds lining the
  shores of Niagara. To say, "We believe" means that we believe not only
  with our head, but with our heart and our wills. Faith means that we
  believe that God can do what He has said and that we believe it so
  thoroughly that we are willing to fully act upon it. Faith does not
  mean that we believe God can do it, but that God can do it with us in
  that "wheelbarrow".