Paul and the Language of Faith

Nijay K. Gupta

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467458375
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

A dynamic reading of Paul's faith language, outlining its subtle nuances as belief, trust, and faithfulness.

Faith language permeates the letters of Paul. Yet, its exact meaning is not always clear. Many today, reflecting centuries of interpretation, consider belief in Jesus to be a passive act. In this important book, Nijay Gupta challenges common assumptions in the interpretation of Paul and calls for a reexamination of Paul's faith language. Gupta argues that Paul's faith language resonates with a Jewish understanding of covenant involving goodwill, trust, and expectation. Paul's understanding of faith involves the transformation of one's perception of God and the world through Christ, relational dependence on Christ, as well as active loyalty to Christ.

Pastors and scholars alike will benefit from this close examination of Paul's understanding and use of faith language. For Gupta, Paul's understanding involves a divine-human relationship centered on Christ that believes, trusts, and obeys.

1Beyond Belief

Paul’s Dynamic Faith Language

I believe in, credo in, means that I am not alone. In our glory and in our misery we men are not alone. God comes to meet us and as our Lord and Master. He comes to our aid. . . . One way or other, I am in all circumstances in company with Him. . . . Of ourselves we cannot achieve, have not achieved, and shall not achieve a togetherness with Him; that we have not deserved that He should be our God, have no power of disposal and no rights over Him, but that with unowed kindness, in the freedom of His majesty, He resolved of His own self to be man’s God, our God.

—Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline

To have faith is to be open, vulnerable. It is also to wince and to withdraw. For this reason, faithfulness has a plodding quality. It is more stick-to-itiveness than it is power and glory. The key to faith is persistence. In the face of sin—be it outright evil or simple distraction—it is very difficult to persevere in faith. In the presence of temptation—be it desire or disaster—it is difficult to remain faithful. Yet, for the religious Jew, there is only teshuvah, repentance or re-turning, as the compass needle always returns toward the north.

—David Blumenthal, “The Place of Faith and Grace in Judaism”

In St. Augustine’s sermon on John 20, in view of the resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples, he addresses the obvious problem of a human (risen) Jesus passing through a wall to present himself to his disciples. How is this possible? Augustine made appeal to the uniqueness of Jesus even before his death and resurrection (whereby, for example, he could walk on water, though he had normal body weight). But he finishes his thought with a striking notion: “Where reason fails, faith builds up.”¹ Augustine himself was far from being opposed to reason,² but there has admittedly been a problematic tension in the history of Christianity between faith and reason. There is, of course, very good reason why the term “faith” has become a distinctively Christian word. After all, the word πίστις, the Greek word often translated “faith,” is found hundreds of times in the New Testament (and over thirty-five times in Romans alone). Important words like “faith,” though, when overused, tend to get flattened out and have meanings and connotations attributed to it that do not go back to the faith language of Scripture, or do not represent the depth and richness of that word (group). There are three problematic trends in the way Christians (and others) use faith language in religious ways.

Faith as Opinion

A few years ago, I taught a course that introduced the basics of Christianity to first-year college students. Not long after day one, students began debating issues like the historical reliability of the Gospels and the ability to prove the resurrection or divinity of Jesus. I was particularly taken aback when a student tried to end a debate by saying, “I don’t care about proving what I believe. I believe it by faith, and that should be enough.” As the course went on, I began to notice a trend whereby students used the language of faith in a way someone would use the word “opinion.” In that sense, faith became a means of occluding conversation of an academic nature by removing any grounds for debate. “I believe it by faith,” in that context, meant that reasons were not needed, even perhaps that reason wasn’t needed. But is that what Paul meant when he talked about faith? I am afraid that many unknowingly buy into Mark Twain’s facetious dictum: faith is believing what you know ain’t so. We must return to the New Testament, and especially Paul, to see how a proper conception of Christian faith operates. What is the relationship between faith and reason?

Faith as Doctrine

A second typical use of faith language in modern religious vocabulary pertains to things like faith statements and faith traditions. Undoubtedly, we get this terminology from the early creeds—doctrinal statements that begin “I believe” (Latin credo). Thus, faith can be nearly synonymous with the language of doctrine or religion, as in “interfaith dialogue.” This is not an unreasonable association based on certain language in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Tim 4:6), but this kind of thinking, where faith equals doctrine, could degenerate into a kind of checklist mentality. This can turn faith into something sterile, purely cerebral, and even gnostic. In his book The Creed, Luke Timothy Johnson makes the point that πίστις is often translated “faith” in English versions of the New Testament, but, in fact, the Greek word has a broad range of meaning that covers a wide spectrum: belief, trust, endurance, loyalty, obedience. When we translate πίστις only as “belief,” the polyvalent nature of the term is suppressed and the cognitive dimension often dominates. Johnson finds this way of flatly translating or understanding πίστις deeply problematic in view of understanding the true nature of Christian confession and life.

One can hold a belief that something is true without letting the belief matter to one’s life. The entire Christian creed can be treated as a set of beliefs that amount to no more than interesting opinions. This is the sort of faith that the letter of James scorns: “You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (Jas 2:19 NRSV).³

Alternatively, Johnson explains that πίστις involves a “response of the whole person.”⁴ Part of what I wish to call for, then, is a patient (re)reading of Paul, the most πίστις-focused writer in the New Testament, in order to understand best how and why he employed πίστις terminology.

Faith as Passive

You might not be surprised to know that Martin Luther was fond of using faith language in reference to his conception of Christianity. In narrating his own epiphany about the true nature of righteousness through Christ, Luther writes:

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘He who through faith is righteous shall live.’ ” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which a merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me.⁵

As Alister McGrath explains, Luther understood justification to involve the transference of an alien righteousness to unrighteous persons by faith: “We are passive, and God is active, in our justification. Grace gives, and faith gratefully receives—and even that faith must itself be seen as a gracious gift of God.”⁶

The heart of this notion of a passive receipt of righteousness seems close to how some characterize the nature of faith itself (though I do not think Luther himself ultimately favored a notion of “passive faith”; see 24–27). For example, Old Testament scholar Walter Kaiser summarizes the nonmeritorious acceptance of God’s grace in view of the exemplary faith of Abraham:

God does the accounting; God does the reckoning; God does the crediting; God does the justifying—the declaring of this man to be just. Abraham does nothing. God gave the promise which Abraham had only to receive. Sometimes the question is asked, Is believing a work in itself? Do we have “faith in faith”? Can we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps? The answer, of course, is that faith is passive. It is a passive act. It is like receiving a Christmas present: we put out our hands to take, to accept, to receive. There is nothing more than a passive act here. We don’t earn our Christmas presents. The same is true with faith.⁷

The New Testament writers clearly believed that God gave a gift in his grace that no one deserves. Thus, it is fitting to talk about believers as recipients. But does the language of passivity fit the nature of Pauline πίστις? Did the word πίστις in Paul’s time communicate nonactivity, passivity, even a passive act?

One might appeal to Pauline language that juxtaposes faith and works (Rom 3:21–31; 9:32; Gal 2:16; cf. Eph 2:8–9). However, because of the complex history of the interpretation of Paul in the church and Western society, it is best to set a discussion of the Pauline language of faith (πίστις) on the right track by beginning with the Old Testament. Through a study that takes a particularly Jewish perspective on the language of faith, we can understand Paul’s theology in a way that goes beyond (merely) belief.

The Old Testament Foundation of Paul’s Use of Πίστις

Two times Paul quotes Hab 2:4 (“the righteous will live by faith”) in order to make a point about a Christian life determined by πίστις (Gal 3:11; Rom 1:17). That should be a key indicator that his own understanding of faith was highly (though not exclusively) influenced by the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was, for all intents and purposes, what Paul read as Scripture.⁸ Thus, in order to make the most sense of what Paul meant when he used the language of πίστις, it is necessary to investigate how the Septuagint translators used this word, especially in view of Hebrew/Aramaic terms and ideas. A substantial discussion of the use of πίστις is coming in chapter 3, but at this juncture it is crucial that a proper perspective on the scriptural use of faith language is adumbrated.

A study of the relationship between the Greek Septuagint and the Hebrew Old Testament demonstrates that, while the Septuagint translators used πίστις in relation to a number of Hebrew words, the three most common are אמן ,אמונה, and אמת. The first word, אמן, means “trust” or “reliability.” The second, אמונה, is quite similar.⁹ In contexts related to human relationships, אמונה “often refers to those who have the capacity to remain stable (i.e., faithful) amid the unsettling circumstances of life, realizing God’s truth has established them.”¹⁰ For example, the term is used of Moses’s hands as Aaron and Hur supported him on the hill of Rephidim (Exod 17:12). Thus, his hands were firm, steady, reliable.

The third term, אמת, can be translated “faithfulness” or “dependability.”¹¹ Isaiah 38:3 furnishes a helpful example. Here Hezekiah, having taken ill, pleads before God with these words: “Remember now, O LORD, I implore you, how I have walked before you in faithfulness [אמת] with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight” (NRSV).

Walter Brueggemann stresses how the Old Testament language of faith is everywhere associated with covenant relationship. Within this construct, faith has less to do with theological ideas per se than with the nature and integrity of a relationship of trust. Brueggemann writes:

“Faith” concer...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by James D. G. Dunn
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Beyond Belief
• 2. Faith in Paul
• 3. Πίστις in Ancient Non-Jewish and Jewish Literature
• 4. Will He Find Faith on Earth?
• 5. Faithfulness Is Better
• 6. Strange Wisdom
• 7. On Faith and Forms
• 8. Covenantal Pistism
• 9. And the Righteous Will Live by Trust
• 10. Revisiting “The Faith of Christ”
• 11. Faith beyond Belief
• Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Texts