Undeception

The old race of the Pharisees is by no means extinct; they were St Paul’s great trouble, and are yet to be found in every religious community under the sun.

The one only thing truly to reconcile all differences is, to walk in the light. So St Paul teaches us in his epistle to the Philippians, the third chapter and sixteenth verse. After setting forth the loftiest idea of human endeavour in declaring the summit of his own aspiration, he says—not, ‘This must be your endeavour also, or you cannot be saved;’ but, ‘If in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you. Nevertheless whereto we have already attained, let us walk by that same.’ Observe what widest conceivable scope is given by the apostle to honest opinion, even in things of grandest import!—the one only essential point with him is, that whereto we have attained, what we have seen to be true, we walk by that. In such walking, and in such walking only, love will grow, truth will grow; the soul, then first in its genuine element and true relation towards God, will see into reality that was before but a blank to it; and he who has promised to teach, will teach abundantly. Faster and faster will the glory of the Lord dawn upon the hearts and minds of his people so walking—then his people indeed; fast and far will the knowledge of him spread, for truth of action, both preceding and following truth of word, will prepare the way before him. The man walking in that whereto he has attained, will be able to think aright; the man who does not think right, is unable because he has not been walking right; only when he begins to do the thing he knows, does he begin to be able to think aright; then God comes to him in a new and higher way, and works along with the spirit he has created.

George MacDonald (from his sermon “The Truth in Jesus”, published in Unspoken Sermons, Series 2, 1885)

While studying NT Greek in undergrad, I became interested in linguistics. I gradually became alarmed as I discovered that key insights into human language made by linguists were hardly ever taken into account among scholars intending to interpret the Bible from the original languages. Greek and Hebrew are treated by too many exegetes as special codes more than as living, changing, and internally diverse human languages.

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Over the last couple of days, Joseph Kelly and John Hobbins had a brief blogversation about what ḥesed means in the Hebrew Bible. These two guys are waaaaaaaay out of my league on this sort of discussion, and to my knowledge do not fall prey to the above mentioned shortcomings of biblical scholars, but reading Joseph’s last post prompted these thoughts.

Just as an outside observer, it appears that what we have here may be a result of treating semantics on a synchronic basis rather than reconstructing possible diachronic effects — not to mention the possible effect of synchronic language variation. That is, I think it’s clear that ḥesed means something very much like ‘loyalty’ in certain passages as Joseph suggests, ‘justice’ in others, and very much like ‘random acts of kindness’ in others (e.g. Ruth). As a linguist looking at this broad usage, I think we’re seeing the concept being used differently in different communities, probably living at different periods in history.

I admit that I’m no expert in OT chronology, and I have by no means done a study on every instance of this word. But I’ll offer one highly conjectural sketch of what the evolution of the word could have looked like:

It appears as though the word originally meant something akin to ‘obligated fairness’ and gradually evolved into more of a bland sense of ‘favor’. Psalms presents an early meaning, namely ‘justice, fairness’; at a later period (Exodus, 2 Samuel, etc.), Israel’s conviction of God’s favor for their community may have helped broaden and even dilute the concept to mean ‘loyalty, faithfulness’, perhaps further weakened toward ‘favor, goodness’ (essentially, “YHWH does right by us”); Ruth, typically dated in the Hellenistic period, might be a snapshot of the word at a late period in which the meaning of ‘goodness, favor’ has remained, the semantics of obligation possibly having dropped out over time (although I would also question ruling out a personal sense of obligation in Ruth’s faithfulness to Naomi).

I have focused here on possible diachronic reasons for this word’s varied usage rather than possible variation effects from different, synchronically coexisting theological or geographical communities. And as I said, this is nothing more than an armchair analysis. But this sort of variation in meaning between texts is absolutely the kind of thing that we must expect in our linguistic excavations in the Bible, and it’s also the kind of thing that biblical scholars don’t pay enough attention to. They often end up inflating words with all kinds of semantic baggage in ways akin to the Amplified Bible.

Lord knows I’m not accusing either the linguistically astute John Hobbins or Joseph Kelly of this, but I did think this particular discussion might benefit from those considerations in ways I hadn’t seen offered so far.

Going into this post, please be aware that I will indulge in the obnoxious habit of capitalizing Truth to distinguish the abstract concept of veritas from small-t truths that amount to individual factoids. I hope this will not distract you.

As a teenager I was once informed by a mentor that I was a “seeker of Truth.” This was a defining moment for me, not because it changed my behavior, but because it made me startlingly aware of this behavior. I have proudly owned that badge ever since, although I do generally try to keep it under my coat so as not to annoy people. This blog has been a workshop for me in my continuing mission to search for Truth, especially in places considered unlikely by others who shared my upbringing.

In the last year, however, something has changed. It’s not that I value Truth less; it’s just that I have behaved less and less as though it were my sacred calling to fight for Truth. One of the truths I have seen confirmed again and again over the last several years is that no one, not even inveterate Truth-seekers, have a monopoly on it. The greatest threat to Truth comes from those whose confidence that they have it lead them to root out everyone making a counter-claim. This conviction puts me on a collision course with heresy hunters, who in the name of defending the Truth of God have crammed it so tightly into a cage that I can scarcely imagine their having any real affection for it.

Here’s another lesson that I have been learning over the last several, quiet months, which I’ve just now figured out how to articulate: Truth doesn’t need my protection. It is larger than I am. I am not its steward; instead, I am responsible for my own character — my own actions and reactions. I can and should promote what I think is true and show what is false for what it is, with discretion and all due diligence in determining it, of course. But primarily, I am called to follow Christ, subjecting my will to the service of God and others. By far the best and most important way to serve Truth is by acting like we believe it, viz. through obedience to what we believe. I believe that the highest, most elusive truth of the universe is Love — so if my life is not characterized by Love-seeking, how can I pretend to be a Truth-seeker?

Watching the biblioblogosphere as closely as I have for the last couple of years, I’ve seen and participated in far too many ugly wars for Truth. Bitter, dismissive, and insulting diatribes put into defense of beliefs are not a bit more common among the heresy-hunting Fundamentalist types than they are among the enlightened who embrace doubt and uncertainty. Friends, Truth is a sword meant to hew through the brambles of untruths, not the people trapped behind them.

If I can’t act in love during my tousles for Truth, treating the other person as a child of God no matter how obviously, infuriatingly ignorant they are, then what I am upholding and defending is not Truth but my own pet truths, factoids that I cognitively assent to, at the expense of the greatest truth I know. There is nothing more false than conflating my truth with the Truth.

I forsee the objection that impassioned debates are often necessary to ferret out the facts; besides, didn’t Jesus himself use angry words and call his opponents on the carpet? Indeed he did. But he also told us, “Be angry, and sin not.” This tells me, until you’re righteous, don’t feign righteous anger. Righteous anger is so hard to distinguish from the unrighteous kind; this ambiguity is a caution against blowing up in defense of our rightness. We need to remember what we’re fighting for.

You see, fighting for Truth so often treats it as a trophy to be won, a public reward for our diligent Truth-seeking. I want to get out of this closed circuit of seeking Truth for seeking Truth’s sake. If we don’t live up to the light we do have – and I hope we can all agree that living a life characterized by loving humility qualifies – no matter how accurately and convincingly we argue for truths, we are not lovers of Truth.

The old meaning of the adjective true, seldom used these days, was faithful; actually, that meaning is still around in our usage of it in the sense of faithfulness to reality. The Truth I seek is a more robust form of faithfulness than that: faithfulness to God even more than faithfulness to reality, which we can hardly claim to know with any certainty anyway. I want to be much more than a Truth seeker; I want to be a Truth lover. Even if I miss truths here and there, and even though I recognize that I’ll never obtain certainty in this world, Truth will continue to be my ideal and the template I use to shape my character.

If I mistake, he will forgive me. I do not fear him; I fear only lest, able to see and write these things, I should fail of witnessing, and myself be, after all, a castaway—no king, but a talker; no disciple of Jesus, ready to go with him to the death, but an arguer about the truth; a hater of the lies men speak for God, and myself a truth-speaking liar, not a doer of the word.

G. MacDonald

The subtle, silent epiphany of the last several months has been that what I must seek first is not truths – disembodied facts and undeceptions – but righteousness. One of the most profound undeceptions I’ve undergone is the realization that righteousness is not some legal decree that magically covers and converts my own rancid attitudes and actions. It’s not that simple at all. Being a true Christian in the deepest sense of that word (maybe I should capitalize it) is hard work. But the real dirty work of Christianity is not in controlling our actions, but our re-actions: how we respond to problems such as getting cut off in traffic, how we deal with those who are hurting those we love, and how we treat defenders of patent falsehoods. Seeking Truth is not enough; we must be true.

God give me a true heart.

Does your Christian tradition teach or imply that it is better to err on the side of faith than works?

Yesterday I posted a quote from MacDonald that indicted the doctrine of imputed righteousness as an inoculation from pursuing personal holiness. As luck would have it, that same morning a web-only Christianity Today article by Jason Hood pushed back against a modern movement in that same direction, strong especially among the most fiercely monergistic Christians, a group whose predecessors 150 years ago were the subject of MacDonald’s critique. Theirs is an attempt to make sure everyone knows first of all that the gospel is all about what Christ has done on our behalf and nothing about what believers can do. To some degree it is this conviction that is behind a trending preoccupation with the concept of “grace” among the New Calvinists, typified by the Sovereign Grace movement. I sometimes think that if these people could find wriggle room in just one of the so-called “doctrines of grace” (the five points of Calvinism), it would be in “the perseverance of the saints”, just so that they could threaten expulsion from the elect for those who momentarily faltered from trusting “Christ alone” for salvation.

In particular, Hood writes to target a rhetorical device in which the speaker suggests that being accused of antinomianism is a sign that the gospel-centric preacher is doing something right in emphasizing our utter dependence on the sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. Now, figuring out what precisely antinomianism (anti-law-ism) means is a huge undertaking, because it means different things depending on who is charging whom with promoting it. Here in the case of the argument Hood is attacking, it refers to a tendency to reject more rules and guidelines of behavior than is spiritually healthy, to be so anti-legalism that you will stop doing good works at all. Hood cites no less a leading light than Martyn Lloyd-Jones as an example of someone who suggests that being accused of favoring too much grace in this way just might be an indication that one is on the right side of the grace/works divide.

Before reading this article, I don’t think I’d heard that meme specifically, but I have recently heard someone preaching his conviction that being charged with advocating “cheap grace” for emphasizing the wholly unmerited nature of God’s grace is offensive, given that 1) it cost Jesus his life, 2) for the rest of us, grace is free, and 3) it’s a dreadful thing to try to add to what Christ has already done. This is the same idea as above, symptomatic of a faulty view of what the gospel is. In the Synoptics especially, Jesus was hardly a critic of “works-based righteousness”: for instance, in Matthew Jesus is shown teaching that the difference between a sheep who inherits life and a goat who inherits destruction was purely and wholly a matter of behavior. As Hood points out, even Paul was more against works of Torah than he was against good works generally.

I do reject the idea that we must earn salvation by jumping through hoops, and I mourn the fatigue and condemnation felt by those who believe that doing enough good things and avoiding enough bad things make the difference between life and death eternal. My hope rests in the belief that God sees and empathizes with our many weaknesses. Yet I am convinced that the particularly and predominantly Protestant emphasis on identifying with Christ’s work through belief (“faith“) alone, entirely passively rather than on a more active and holistic level, has tended toward a deeply problematic lack of emphasis on what early believers thought was one of the primary reasons He created and saved us: “good works in Christ.”

Hood’s point is that we should not be happy either with appearing legalistic or antinomian, since both are dangerous. In fairness, the Christians under Hood’s critique would be sure to make a distinction between working out one’s salvation and working for one’s salvation, but it is tragic that in their fear of the latter they would delight in being accused of underplaying the former.

Indeed, I’d go farther than Hood did and say that between the two, the more dangerous over-emphasis is on “trusting in the finished work of Christ alone”, particularly when that phrase is used as shorthand for “not allowing our focus on Christ to stray too far from our theology of what the cross and the resurrection did for us”. A mandated necessity to believe the right things is hard to locate in Scripture, but commands to do the right things, one of which occasionally includes believing, is positively ubiquitous in both Testaments. We are advised that the hallmark, the telltale fruit of faith is faith-fulness, the outworking of (rather than fervent belief in) heavenly truths within our world — the institution of the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed as “the gospel”. This single-minded obsession with the “finished work” of Christ on the cross cannot help but distract us from the ways in which Christ’s work remains unfinished, and in an important way began at his death.

An exclusive emphasis on trusting that Christ did this, that, or the other on the cross or through his resurrection produces a stillborn faith. It is a belief in too little, after all, in that it has a proclivity for stopping us short of believing that one thing that I believe is the most important: what God wants us to believe about how we should live. I am persuaded that, far from it being a dangerous competitor of the work of Christ on the cross and a possible barrier to salvation, a dominating resolution to participate in those works and teachings of Christ before the cross is the most important instantiation of salvation.

When reading one recent testimony at Religion at the Margins, I was deeply saddened: not for the author, who still seeks to imitate Christ despite his loss of faith, but for those who considered his “wayward” theological beliefs to be of more concern than the hurting ones he sought to serve, and still more for those hurting ones who are still being told that their real problem is not “trusting in Christ’s finished work”. Surely the God described in the New Testament who desires that His followers’ character resemble His own would be far more satisfied with an exceptionally ignorant follower, a silly but obedient child in whose life He is able to cultivate righteous attitudes and behaviors but who is somehow under the impression that she serves a Cosmic Platypus, than He would be with a follower who has come to the right conclusions on every aspect of Jesus’ nature and his atonement for us and who even tries to love his neighbor, but who passionately cautions everyone not to attempt to “add to the finished work of Christ” by being preoccupied with doing the sorts of things that Jesus was concerned with during his life.

The overblown fears of “works-based righteousness” and the “social gospel” are insidious because they encourage us to leave undone the nitty gritty work of personal holiness before God, from the hidden negatives, such as not lusting or coveting your neighbor’s blessings, to the visible positives of our faith, such as alleviating the suffering of those in need. Christianity is a much bigger campaign than many understand it to be: it costs us everything. God shows His grace to the world through our participation in the unfinished work of Christ.

Under the typical Protestant understanding of “faith” as “not doubting something that one believes without proof”, I as a young Protestant could never fathom why God would be so tickled by us believing in what we had almost no evidence for. This question came home to me most clearly whenever I heard informal apologetics arguing that the reason God doesn’t just show Himself to us is that if He did, no faith would be necessary, and God really wants us to have faith. Obviously this is quite circular, akin to being asked, “Why do we have to have faith?” and answering, “Because faith is necessary.”

So when I found out in third-year Greek (undergrad) about a related discussion that had been going on in scholarly academic circles, I was intrigued. The main question was about the Pauline expression ek/dia pisteos iesou christou (e.g. Philippians 3.9), customarily, but probably inaccurately, translated as “faith in Jesus Christ”, whereas scholars such as Richard Hays have argued for the reading “faith(fulness) of Jesus Christ”; I just posted my exploratory paper on this topic yesterday. As I described in another recent post, the Greek word that we translate as “faith” also carried the meaning faithfulness (notice that English uses the root “faith-” in both “faith” and “faithfulness” as well). In fact, there is no other word in NT Greek that translates as “faithfulness” as directly as pistis. So theoretically, whether Paul had meant to describe a concept more on the “faithfulness” side or on the “belief” side of pistis, or some hybrid of both “belief” and “faithfulness, he would have in all likelihood used the word pistis in any case. “Belief” and “faithfulness” are two very different English words and markedly different conceptually in our modern understanding, but the fact that the NT often uses them in their divergent semantics in places where the meaning is ambiguous suggests that pistis meant not either/or but indicated a concept closely related to both of them. After all, belief is in a sense a commitment to an idea, and I recognize this usage for “faith” and “believing” (Gk pist-euo) in the NT as well.

But rather than mere cognitive assent to an unproved proposition, I think the best way of viewing the semantic center of pistis is in the words commitment, dependence, trust, and devotion. As I said, “belief” plays a part, since we devote ourselves to things we believe in, and believe in things we are devoted to. But because no facts are unfiltered and uninterpreted by our minds, holding fast to beliefs is in essence dependence upon ourselves and our ability to properly parse those facts. What God requires is commitment to and dependence upon Him, amounting to total surrender. At very least, surely it is obvious that the faith that pleases God is not the type that is taken up and held to without a basis; above all, faith is not about being dogmatic about something we have no evidence for, nor likewise something we have mounds of evidence against.

Paul is the one whose teaching is the source of the common focus on belief in certain propositions. But I am coming to think that he instead was more concerned (at least in some of his writing) that we depend on our identification with Christ, whose surpassing faithfulness to God was displayed by his surrender to the point of death. It is for the sake of his faithfulness that we are saved. In turn, we identify with Christ by sacrificing ourselves (Rom 12.1). Paul’s view was shared by the author of Hebrews, who more clearly articulated it in Hebrews 3.1-6:

Therefore, holy brothers and companions in a heavenly calling, consider Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession; He was faithful to the One who appointed Him, just as Moses was in all God’s household. For Jesus is considered worthy of more glory than Moses, just as the builder has more honor than the house. Now every house is built by someone, but the One who built everything is God. Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s household, as a testimony to what would be said [in the future]. But Christ was faithful as a Son over His household, whose household we are if we hold on to the courage and the confidence of our hope. [HCS]

Paul seems to have argued that God grants us grace by associating us with Christ’s work. God graciously identifies us as faithful to Himself through our identification with Jesus in a relationship of joint commitment, not from our accomplishment of the works of the Law, which was regarded as within the bounds of human ability alone. Our faithfulness is not the prerequisite to this grace, but its goal. In fact, one reason why many Protestant biblical scholars are not at all happy with Hays’ reading of pistis christou is the extremely close association in Philippians 3.4-14 between our being identified with Christ’s faithfulness and our participation in His faithfulness:

…and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through (the) faith(fulness) [of] Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith(fulness). I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this… [Philippians 3.9-12a NRSV]

Notice how Paul explicitly states that his participation is not complete and that, inasmuch as it is not, he entertains the possibility of his own failure to attain to the resurrection from the dead! Notice also that this possibility acknowledged by Paul does not disappear no matter how you interpret pistis christou. The author Ephesians 2.8-10 put it this way:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

If we take the view of I outlined above seriously, we notice that these verses essentially equate pistis with good works. A paraphrase of the verse reveals this: “By God’s grace you are saved through faithfulness, and this faithfulness is God’s gift as well, and not something the Law could have brought about. For it is God who has crafted us into instruments of doing good works [faithfulness] that He desires.” The key distinction is between “works” and “good works”. Paul never devalues “good works”; his criticism is of works of the Law (this post discusses what he probably meant by that), which is what Paul means by “works” when it is not qualified (unlike James). In fact, we are told that performing “good works” is what we are supposed to be about doing (2 Cor 9.8). This understanding of what “faith” is becomes clearest when we look outside of the epistles recognized by scholars today as authentic Pauline epistles: see Col 1.10, 2 Tim 2.21, 2 Tim 3.17; cf. also Hebrews (discussed above) and James (discussed below). Ephesians 2.8-10 isn’t saying that good works are not necessary — indeed, the opposite — but that no one is able to hold up his/her end of the bargain by doing good works apart from God’s grace, simply by following the Law. Reading “faith” and “works” in this light actually reconciles an apparent conflict between the theology of Paul and James, who wrote, “Faith without works is dead”. James seems to be arguing against precisely the sort of misinterpretation of Paul that Luther championed; this is why Luther famously rejected the book of James and called it an “epistle of straw”. It is important to realize that unlike Paul, James does not use “works” to refer specifically to any ritual “works of the Law”. He clearly articulates the kind of works he expects that are part and parcel of “faith(fulness)”:

If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead. [James 2.15-17]

He seems to be referring to the “good works” of Ep 2.10, doesn’t he? And as if this weren’t obvious enough, James next appeals to the example of two individuals who lived outside the Law, Abraham and Rahab (vv. 21-26). I find myself under the impression that whether we are to try to please God by works of devotion or not wasn’t even an issue for Paul; this was taken for granted. Rather, he sought to emphasize that inasmuch as we accomplish good works, God is fulfilling His purposes through us:

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose. [Phil 2.12]

Paul certainly contends that we don’t depend on our good works to please God; rather, we depend upon (=”have faith in”) God, submitting and surrendering to (=”having faith in”) Him to follow Him in faithfulness. It seems that, although energized by God’s grace, Paul expected believers to take the maintenance of faith in its true sense as a responsibility.

I’ve known many Christians so afraid of trampling on the work of Christ by depending on good works for salvation that they, in effect, looked down their nose at good works, chastising congregations that spend “too much” time and effort with ministries and programs and not enough with “worship”, by which they meant praising God and basking in His love (especially with music). I understand that many of them spend so much of their lives trying to earn favor with God by proving their own merit that once they encounter the grace that is Christ’s meritorious faithfulness they become intoxicated by it, with the result that they neglect their own “reasonable service” in response. Others find the notion of mental assent to true propositions to be the core framework for faith based on their misapprehension of what faith meant to the biblical authors, and understandably spend the bulk of their time in developing the perfect set of beliefs and disparaging those who don’t do likewise. I think these are all distractions at best, and outright perversions of biblical faith at worst. We are to show true worship to God not only by thanking Him, but by committing our best effort to modeling the faithfulness set before us by Jesus.

No soteriological answers here. But it’s fertile ground for discussion, isn’t it?

Originally inspired by this recent post by Doug Chaplin, I exhumed a paper I wrote in third year Greek while an undergrad (I estimate this to be c. 2000-2001). As a segue between my last post and my next, I thought I’d present it here with minimal edits. Please realize that the scholarship within this is a good decade behind, but given the modesty of the claims in this overview, I sincerely doubt that much of what is argued below has been soundly defeated.

The interpretation of Iesou Christou as an objective genitive (faith in Jesus Christ) in Galatians 2.16 and 3.22 (cf. Php 3.9) is the overwhelmingly pervasive reading of that construction. Fairly recently, however, scholarship has had to come to terms with the work of many scholars such as Richard B. Hays, who argues most strenuously that our modern fixation on the freedom of the individual conscience distorts Paul’s concerns. In his article, “Jesus’ Faith and Ours” (Theological Students Fellowship Bulletin, 7 No. 1 [S-O 1983], 2-6), Hays argued that nowhere in Galatians 3 does Paul place any emphasis on the salvific efficacy of “believing,” and nor does he speak of Jesus Christ as the object of human faith. Paul insists that we are redeemed/justified by Jesus Christ’s faithfulness (pistis Iesou Christou) on our behalf, not by our believing.

What must be demonstrated to make this minority view plausible?

The case for the subjective genitive interpretation (faith/faithfulness of Christ Jesus) is grammatically the most obvious. BAGD notes that translating the genitive as “in” is possible with reference to pistis, but acknowledges that pistis is usually found without an object. Moreover, translating the genitive as “of” is most commonly preferable with most other words. Noteworthy among the arguments for the subjective genitive view is that when pistis takes a personal genitive it is almost never an objective genitive (cf. Matt 9:2, 22, 29; Mark 2:5; 5:34; 10:52; Luke 5:20; 7:50; 8:25, 48; 17:19; 18:42; 22:32; Rom 1:8; 12; 3:3; 4:5, 12, 16; 1 Cor 2:5; 15:14, 17; 2 Cor 10:15; Phil 2:17; Col 1:4; 2:5; 1 Thess 1:8; 3:2, 5, 10; 2 Thess 1:3; Titus 1:1; Phlm 6; 1 Pet 1:9, 21; 2 Pet 1:5). Douglas Campbell, an advocate of the subjective usage, has been accused of being too dogmatic or dramatic by Brian Dodd, who has sympathies with the subjective camp, because Campbell makes the statement that how we take Paul’s usage of pistis Christou Iesou might “open up the possibility of a major reevaluation of Paul’s . . . theology as a whole.” However, Hays in both the article mentioned above and his dissertation, The Faith of Jesus Christ, highlights the significance of this alternative translation when he makes the statement that in Galatians, Paul insists we are justified by Christ’s faith/faithfulness, not our believing.

Much research and study has gone into this debate, with conservative scholars even delving into the ranks of those who see Christ’s faith/faithfulness as Paul’s intended meaning in such phrases as dia pisteos and ek pisteos, even in passages where the specifier Christou Iesou is not present. The likeliest loci for this scenario are Romans 1:17 and 3:25-26.

Romans 1:17 is Paul’s quotation of Habakkuk 2:4, “The righteous one shall live by faith/faithfulness.” Campbell took this statement as Messianic, so better to be translated, “The Righteous One shall live by His faithfulness.” One could still argue for the faithfulness of Christ being the basis for life (rather than believing faith on the part of the believer) if one takes the “righteous one” to be any number of people who now have the opportunity to live rather than a reference to Christ, and therefore, “The righteous one shall live by His faith/faithfulness.”

Paul in Romans 3:25-26 states, as the New English Translation translates it, “God publicly displayed him as a satisfaction for sin by his blood through faith. This was to demonstrate his righteousness, because God in his forbearance had passed over the sins previously committed. This was also to demonstrate his righteousness in the present time, so that he would be just and the justifier of the one who lives because of Jesus’ faithfulness,” or ek pisteos Iesou. This passage shows the value of such an interpretation: Jesus was put on display as a satisfaction for sin by his blood through faith (dia pisteos); in other words, Jesus was capable of demonstrating God’s righteousness in being publicly displayed because Jesus had faith or was faithful, not because of our faith in Him.

This concept is similar to that in Galatians 3:13-14, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us (because it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’) in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham would come to the Gentiles, so that we could receive the promise of the Spirit by faith.” Longenecker’s commentary on Galatians discusses Paul’s paradigm of Abraham’s faith and our justification by looking at the perception of Jewish writers concerning Abraham’s faith/faithfulness. Jewish scholars tended to view Abraham’s extreme faith and faithfulness as being their very salvation, much as the Church of Rome would much later come to proclaim with the idea of “works of supererogation.” In other words, Abraham’s merit was so exceedingly worthy of God’s favor that those who are Abraham’s seed are worthy of God’s favor by virtue of Abraham’s merit. Another common picture was that of Abraham’s ten trials through which he remained faithful. If one sees Paul’s use of the term pistis in this passage as referring to Christ’s faith being that wih which we must be identified for justification, a faithfulness that was consistent enough even to submit to being cursed by hanging on a tree, then we see that it is Christ’s work of supererogation that justified Abraham and therefore us as well. Galatians 2:16 contrasts those who seek to be justified by works of the Law and those who seek to be justified dia pisteos Iesou Christou. Instead of the common translation of being “justified through faith in Jesus Christ,” read “justified through Jesus Christ’s merit,” or “Jesus Christ’s work of supererogation” (which means, after all, “a work above or beyond”). This merit can be seen by his death, being publicly placarded as Paul reminds the Galatians in 3:1. Jesus’ obedience unto death providing for redemption is also strongly demonstrated in Romans 5:19: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of one man many will be made righteous.”

The case is, then, rather strong for the belief that the faith that we stand upon is not our own, but that of Jesus, upon whose merit alone we may hope to be justified.

_________________________

I just came across this bibliography devoted to this topic. I used a few of those sources for my paper, although inexplicably the copy of the paper that I have doesn’t show them.

I have always thought that Hebrews 11.1 sounded beautiful, with a mystical air to it:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (KJV)

Some of the mystery surrounding it resulted from its sounding so much like a riddle: a verse whose first few words signal a definition (“Now faith is…”) ends up leaving you more questions than the one you had about “faith” to begin with. What’s all this stuff about substance and evidence of the unseen? Faith is just “believing”, right?

Well, no. But this is the way many modern translations make it sound. When it’s said that “faith is the ὑπόστᾰσις of things hoped for,” a lot hinges on how one translates the word with funny letters, transliterated as hypostasis.

I could go way back into church history and show how this word is used by Christians to refer to how God was “grounded” or realized in the person of Jesus so that the man Jesus was also fully God (the “hypostatic union”). Or I could go much further back and break down its etymological constituents (Gk hypo- ‘below’ + stasis ‘standing’). But what do either have to do with Hebrews 11.1?

More helpful by far it is to make note of that term’s usage in pre-Christian Stoicism to distinguish actual existence, substance, from abstract existence. This is where the “substance of things hoped for” comes into play. Faith is the realization, the proof in the pudding of things hoped for, which not coincidentally is more or less equivalent to “the evidence of things not seen.” It’s parallelism.

So why, then, is hypostasis translated as “being sure” in the (T)NIV, “assurance” in the NASB, or “confidence” in the ESV? I mean, it’s obvious that there will be some “confidence/assurance/being sure” resulting from having evidence or proof, but is that rendering not heavily reliant on the idea of faith as “belief”? This verse in those translations leads to the impression that, “Faith is placing your hope in things that haven’t been proved yet.” That is not what faith is, in Hebrews or anywhere.

But especially in Hebrews: try inserting any of the above translations of hypostasis in Heb 1.3, where it is usually translated “nature” (which is…well, closer to the right meaning) or “being” (that’s much more like it). Let’s try plugging those words from Heb 11.1 into the NASB of 1.3 (which actually reads “nature”):

And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His being-sure…

And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His assurance…

And He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His confidence…

These highlight the eisegetical problem of the (T)NIV, NASB, and ESV translations of Heb 11.1; they translated it based upon what they thought we knew about what faith is, not what the author of Hebrews was telling us it is.

Next, look at the only other use of hypostasis in Hebrews, viz. Heb 3.14:

(T)NIV: We have come to share in Christ if we hold firmly till the end the confidence we had at first.

NASB: For we have become partakers of Christ, if we hold fast the beginning of our assurance firm until the end,

ESV: For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.

These translations make a lot of sense to us on first blush due to our belief in the importance of persistent belief, which, it must be noted, is in no small part attributable to this verse (not exactly a favorite of Calvinists).

No doubt the “confidence/assurance” reading was influenced in v. 14 by the close parallel in v. 3, which happens to include a different word more consistently translated as confidence. But the parallelism between the verses cannot be credibly sustained upon close analysis: they’re saying different things, even though they use a similar construction.

It’s not “the beginning of our confidence” that must be held firm; this suggests “unwaveringly believing the same thing we did in the beginning,” placing the onus on uncompromising mental assent that’s easily extended to all kinds of doctrines and traditions learned “in the beginning” of our Christian walk. That interpretation’s great for keeping Christians in lockstep theologically. Here again, “confidence” and indeed persistence are involved, but in a more subtle way. Read the Holman Christian Standard version of this verse:

For we have become companions of the Messiah if we hold firmly until the end the reality that we had at the start.

[Unfortunately, then they go and legitimize the "confidence" translation by including it in a footnote.]

In other words, we may indeed be confident, but it’s confidence in the reality or substance we experienced at the beginning.

I think you can see that hypostasis hardly means confidence, particularly in Hebrews. It means ‘substance, reality, being, realization’ and other such.

Why does this matter? Because of what the other translations (“confidence”, “being sure”, etc.) have done to bolster the misunderstanding of “faith” parodied by Mark Twain: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

Generally speaking, faith, translating Gk pistis, is much better translated by “faithfulness” or “devotion”. This is especially true of Hebrews. Look at 3.2-6′s contrast of Moses’ faithfulness over little versus Christ’s faithfulness over much more. That’s where the whole “hold fast” aspect comes into play in both v. 6 and v. 14!

So let’s plug this back in to Hebrews 11.1. “Faith is the actualization of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Notice that belief in the unseen is almost present in this verse, but it’s parallel to “things hoped for/not seen”, not “substance/evidence”. The real meaning of pistis in this passage is the on-earth realization of what, or rather Whom, is believed. The author of Hebrews is describing belief and trust as the motivation for faith. He goes on in that chapter to describe people living out their belief and trust in God by their faithfulness. That’s why James was so baffled that people would say they “believed” (=had trust in) God while not presenting any substance or evidence.

What are your thoughts on these observations? I probably sound a bit more “confident” than I actually am on a lot of these points, but at this stage I’m convinced. I ask for your help in nuancing my understanding.