Tag Archive - pistis Christou

Jesus’ Own Faith

February 7, 2011 in Bible Thoughts with 28 Comments

In conversation with some comments that ensued after the “faith of Jesus Christ” post from last week, I want to underscore what I think is essential about the identity of Jesus, an aspect highlighted by the “faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ” reading of Galatians 1:16.

In order for Jesus to be truly human, he had to act on faith in obeying God the Father.

The idea that Jesus was obedient is highlighted several times in the New Testament. And, this obedience never has to do with obeying in general (e.g., the Law) but always with the specific acts of obedience tied to Jesus’ vocation as Messiah. Specifically, both Paul (Rom 5, Phil 2) and Hebrews speak of Jesus’ going to death on the cross as his act of obedience.

And what they say with the word “obedience,” the Gospels depict with a story.

Mark shows Jesus wrestling in the Garden. He prays for deliverance, but ends with, “Not what I will, but what you will be done.”

Jesus is going to death as an act of obedience.

Is this, also, an act of faith?

Without a doubt.

If we take the definition of Hebrews 11: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” then Jesus is the quintessential faith-ful one.

Jesus went to death–which he could clearly see approaching–in faith of the unseen yet firmly believed hope that he would also be raised from the dead.

In the Synoptics, Paul, and elsewhere, it is the Father by the power of the Spirit that raises Jesus. Jesus does not shrink back at the point of suffering, but is faithful, looking forward to the unseen hope of resurrection glory.

When The Man appears on the stage of human history, he shows us what it means to be truly human. In part, this entails faith in God. And for most all of us it will mean faith in God even in the face of death–sometimes to the point of death as the very fruit of our faith.

This was true of Jesus first, and that’s why he is the architect and finisher of our faith.

He designed it.

He lived it.

He perfected it.

And how he gives it to us, and calls us to faithfully embody it.

So that we, too, can be truly human.

Worshiping Puritans and Believing Christ

February 3, 2011 in Academia, Bible Thoughts with 17 Comments

Tonight I will be leading my Acts-Revelation class through the magnificent glories of Galatians. This will include, of course, a brief excursion into the ever-riveting subjective genitive versus objective genitive debate.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, this post is for you.

If you know what I’m talking about and have to figure out how to teach this idea to students who don’t know Greek, this post is even more for you.

I’ve found that I really only have one weapon in my arsenal sufficient to the task of helping my students get their minds around the translation problems that beset Galatians 2:16. It is a tool that was delivered to my mailbox, free of charge, when I was a student at Westminster Seminary.

Here it is:

You can imagine the excitement I felt upon receiving such a book. At last! Someone who has the chutzpah to write an honest history of American Presbyterianism! A book about how we Presbies have done nothing but worship the English Puritans from the time we set foot in this country!

How disappointed I was to flip open the volume and discover that it was not, in fact, a book about how we Americans had worshiped the English Puritans, but was rather about how the English Puritans had worshiped God.

I had been deliriously happy at the thought of the Puritans being the object of the verbal noun “worship;” and deflated by the realization that they were, in fact, the subject of the implied noun instead.

In Greek, this sort of construction would have been done with a genitive case, and described as either an “objective genitive” (Puritans are the object of worship) or a “subjective genitive” (they are the subjects who worship).

And in Galatians 2:16 and elsewhere we have to decide whether the expression “faith of Jesus Christ” means faith that we place in Jesus Christ (objective genitive, like worshiping the Puritans) or faith that Jesus Christ himself exercises (subjective genitive, like the Puritans worshiping God).

Knowing that a person is not justified by works of Torah but rather through the faith of Jesus Christ (ours in him, = faith in Jesus Christ; or, Christ’s faith?), even we have believed…

There’s the problem. Solve as you will.

But for my part, I’ve already been burned by the objective genitive once… Not doing that again…

The Righteousness of God (3b of 4)

October 1, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

This is where attempting to dissociate “righteousness” from God’s work on behalf of God’s people starts to fall apart. It’s not that there is a quality of God that needs to be lived up to. Romans 3 tells us that God reveals his righteousness when he makes a way to vindicate/acquit people who affiliate with Jesus.

It’s not just that God has to live up to a standard. It’s that the standard to which God desires to live up is the one in which people are vindicated before him. When we talk about righteousness, we are talking about God’s ability to vindicate people who are not worthy of vindication.

And here’s where the surprise comes into the Jewish story: the act that God judged worthy of vindication was Jesus’ death on the cross. And, acquittal looks like being associated with that death so as to be joined to that resurrection-vindication.

In all this:

  1. I think that Wright, Piper, and the Reformed tradition generally agree that God is being seen as a judge who acts justly in the vindication of humanity. The “courtroom” idea is common to all of them.
  2. Wright insists, and the Reformed Tradition should have room for, the idea that the standards of the courtroom are the stipulations of the covenant that God established with Israel. Wright does not think “relationship” is all that helpful a term unless paired with the notion of covenant membership.
  3. Wright, Piper, and the Reformed tradition more generally all agree that the death of Jesus makes God able to do what he could not do based on mere humanity: justify just sinners.
  4. By making the basis of justification a “righteousness” of God or of Christ that is a character trait, the Reformed tradition has had to further talk about the idea of “imputation” so that the “stuff” of God or Christ could be transferred to us in order for us to be justified.
  5. By making righteousness an appropriate response to the covenant, Wright has set God’s righteousness as something that does not get “imputed,” but rather “revealed” in the self-giving death of Jesus that enables God to vindicate.
  6. By making righteousness an appropriate response to the covenant, Wright makes Jesus’ obedience in death the act that God sees as righteous so that Jesus can be vindicated and, in turn, those who are in Christ can be vindicated also.
  7. By making the faith that reveals God’s righteousness our own rather than Christ’s, the traditional Reformed perspective is developing the mechanism by which the righteous “stuff” that is Jesus’ or God’s can be transferred (imputed) to believers. Wright’s Christ-faith interpretation functions within a different framework, within which no such mechanism is needed.
  8. The Reformed tradition (and Lutheranism as well) have a strong means of connection with Wright on the centrality of Christ’s death as the justifying principle without reference to imputation. It’s called “union with Christ”. If someone is in Christ, they are baptized into his death–which is the action that God is pleased to receive as the faithful act of obedience that finds vindication. If someone is in Christ they are baptized into his resurrection and participate now in that vindication, are little righteous ones who live by faith.

The Righteousness of God (part 3a of 4)

September 30, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 3 Comments

Some time ago, I came to the conclusion that the fracas over the righteousness of God could not be separated from another favorite perennial NT question: the meaning of pistis, and the pistis Christou debate in particular.

Romans 1:17 reads: “For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed by faith unto faith as it is written, ‘But the one who is righteous by faith will live.”

Somehow, the good news reveals God’s righteousness “by faith”, as it is written, “But the one who is righteous ‘by faith’ will live.”

The ideas are brought together again at the end of Romans 3:

But now, without law, the righteousness of God has been made manifest (being witnessed by the law and the prophets), the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ (or, through faith in Jesus Christ) unto all who exercise faith. For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being righteoused freely by his grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement through faith, by his blood, in order to show forth his righteousness, because in his forbearance he passed over the previously committed sins, to show forth his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who is of the faith of Jesus.

That is one mean sentence! Notice again that the way in which God’s righteous is made known is through faith: either the faith of Jesus in going to the cross or our faith in Jesus (3:22), depending on how you interpret the Greek, it is made manifest through faith and goes out unto the faith of all who believe. The pattern from Romans 1:17 is repeated: from faith unto faith.

But whose faith is it? Christ’s faith in going to death on the cross or our faith in Christ?

Later in the paragraph we’re told: it’s God’s putting forward of Jesus as a sacrifice in his blood that is the act of faith by which God’s righteousness is made known. So when we’re told that the righteousness of God is witnessed to by the law and prophets, it seems that the death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus is the event which they foreshadow.

Thus, when we read in the very first scripture citation in the book of Romans, “the righteous one ‘by faith’ will live”, we do well to read this as a reference to the faithful Christ who was raised because of his fidelity.

This then brings us back to the question of what, exactly, this faithful death of Jesus has to do with the righteousness of God. How does the death of Jesus reveal the righteousness of God?

The passage in Romans 3 tells us that this death of Jesus reveals God’s righteousness because it enables him to justly justify his people.

So what?

Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you.

Faith of Christ: What’s Left?

April 6, 2010 in Bible Thoughts with 13 Comments

Yesterday I read a book review that issued a passing commentary on the author’s decision to read πίστις Χριστοῦ (pistis christou) as “Christ’ faithfulness” rather than “faith in Christ.” The review’s comment was, “Once we take faith out of Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith, one wonders what we have left.”

To which my reply is, “Really?” That sort of comment, while no doubt rhetorically effective for the primarily Lutheran audience for whom it was written, strikes me as shallow theology and shallow scholarship. Please note: I am not claiming that anyone who holds to the objective genitive position (“faith in Christ”) is theologically shallow or an incompetent scholar. I’m arguing instead that this particular assessment is off base.

First, most of us who hold to the subjective genitive reading also affirm that people do have to exhibit faith/fulness in/to Christ in order to be saved. Not only does Paul say in Gal 2:16  that we are saved by Christ’s faithfulness, he also says, “We believed in Christ” (or something thereabouts). Setting aside for the moment the various opinions people hold as to how to translate “we believed in(to) Christ,” the point is that there is a necessary place for a human response of faith to the faithful self-giving of Jesus.

This is why the comment strikes me as shoddy scholarship: the subjective genitive (Christ’s faithfulness) position does not eliminate a human faith response, even if such a response is relativized. And the person who wrote the review, a more polished an respected NT scholar than I will ever be, should know better.

Second, the comment strikes me as theologically shallow. The last time I checked, our theology is not weakened when we recognize that the work of Christ is the lifeblood of our soteriology. What’s left when we recognize that our response of faith is not as central to Paul’s soteriology as the death of Christ? What’s left is that God’s act of redemption, in the offering up of his beloved son, moves more clearly into the foreground so that we can never make the mistake of thinking that our faith saves us [full stop]. We must always recognize that the human disposition is only as good as the object to which it takes hold. Our faith in the faithful self-giving Messiah saves us.

Is that really such an impoverishment of Paul’s theology of justification by faith?