Undeception

Recently I was listening to a pastor describing the gospel in the predominant Reformed fashion as the message that sinners are absolved of guilt because Christ died in order to allow God to punish sin without condemning vile, sinful humanity (at least those of us who are fortunate enough to be among the elect). Under this rubric, “the cross” becomes shorthand for “the way in which Christ received our justly deserved penalty and condemnation”, the so-called penal substitution theory of the atonement. At one point this pastor used Paul’s insistence that he preached nothing but “Christ crucified” as evidence that Paul preached the gospel as defined above.

Have you ever heard that? Someone claiming that the gospel is all Christians need to focus on, all that’s necessary, the only thing we have any business preaching (I do not intend to challenge these assertions here), and in the same breath asserting that “the gospel” means “God punished Jesus in our stead”? Downplaying our utter wickedness and the fact that we deserve to rot in hell for eternity (or even just be consumed) and a primary focus on the ethics of Christianity are seen as tantamount to rejecting the gospel of Christ.

The question that sprang to my mind as I heard the aforementioned pastor, eventually prompting this post, was whether Paul’s phrase “Christ crucified” in 1 Corinthians 1-2 in any way depends upon or implies penal substitution. I believe the answer is a resounding no, so resounding that answering either yes or the more modest yes and no present the danger of propping up a massive distraction from the important message Paul was trying to convey.

The contextual thrust of the passage in which “Christ crucified” is found is unequivocal: Paul is attempting to correct a fundamentally incorrect attitude in the church, an attitude that was hardly unique to Corinth or the first century. He is displeased to have learned that factions have sprung up in the church at Corinth, a faction of Apollos, a faction of Paul, and – with no exemption from criticism – a faction of Christ. Appealing first to those who set themselves up as his followers, he calls attention to the basis of his own leadership, which was not power or eloquence, but humility.

“For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” (1.17)

Building cliques around leadership meant calling attention away from the very power source of the “cross of Christ”, namely, submission. That was counter-intuitive to be sure, but…

“…it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’” (1.19)

It is this immediate context in which the assertion that “we proclaim Christ crucified” is first made:

“‘…but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” (1.23-25)

Nowhere present here or within this entire passage is so much as a passing mention of the wrath of God justly levied against our utterly depraved state. The focus is somewhere else entirely: for Paul, this principle of inversion, the reversal of strong/weak, wise/foolish is a thoroughgoing program, the hallmark and curriculum of the Kingdom.

“Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” (1.26-29; cf. Philippians 2)

Paul appeals to his own example of self-abasement in the interests of others as the only possible basis for his credibility, which basis simultaneously disqualifies him from exaltation:

“…I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.” (2.1-3)

“For when one says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ and another, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ are you not merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each.” (3.4-5)

“So let no one boast about human leaders. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future–all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries.” (3.21-4.1)

Both to those who uphold and who question his authority, Paul repeats his insistence throughout chapters 1 through 3 (as indeed in various places throughout both letters to the Corinthians) that he wielded a leadership exercised only through and valid only because of his submission, sacrifice, and willingness to be persecuted. It’s a sustained, focused argument: Paul’s focus on the message of a crucified Messiah was intended to show his own Christ-like, “cruciform” bona fides.

When we hear “Christ crucified”, we should avoid losing the focus and intent of that phrase in Paul’s argument. For Paul, Christ’s crucifixion was the exemplar of submission and self-sacrifice, paradigmatic of the whole new world order over which Christ has been made king (again cf. Philippians 2, and also see here). If one insists that “Christ crucified” is the gospel, then at very least the gospel must be defined not as “God punished Jesus in our stead” ¹ but as “the Messiah has through self-abasement become Lord of all.”

However, even framing it that way is anachronistic, for the same reason that it should be manifestly clear that the message of the gospel could not be “that Christ received our justly deserved punishment and condemnation”: the gospel long predates Jesus’ crucifixion. Jesus preached the good news of the Kingdom of God from the very beginning of his ministry, and we have absolutely no reason to believe that his own future death was the subject of his main message. The good news, the gospel, was of the coming of the Kingdom of God, an original conception of which was anticipated by other sects of Judaism before him and found its roots in the canonical Old Testament (e.g. Isaiah 40.4-5). Jesus took up the mantle to fulfill those hopes: the oppressed would be vindicated and the oppressors laid low. Originally, and even in the first century, this eschatological corrective was envisaged as taking place by the restoration of national Israel’s political fortunes. However, it seems that the earliest Christians saw in Jesus a Messiah, a divine restorative agent, who did not overcome might with might, but with self-sacrifice.

No one searching for Paul’s unity with the teachings of Jesus should miss this unifying, early Christian motivating vision of the reign of God: mutual submission and voluntary servanthood is at the heart of the Kingdom of which Christ is king. Interestingly, here we find one of the least disputable indications of the content of the historical Jesus’ teachings, since this principle of inversion not only dominates the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians, the earliest known Christian writing, but also features prominently in the Synoptics (and, for what it’s worth, the Gospel of Thomas as well).

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¹ Despite my oft stated misgivings with the doctrine, I do not mean to claim that there is no trace of the idea of penal substitution intimated or implied within Paul’s writings. However, the frequent use of the expression “Christ crucified” as a proof that Paul thought the core of Christian soteriology to be God’s wrath against sin appeased through punishing Jesus is surely wrong-headed. For if Jesus was exalted to lordship for accepting the cup, what part would that person play who demands satisfaction for wrongs done him –even if that person was God Himself? Would he not be the last, the lowest, the least Christ-like? Jesus would not in that case be exemplifying the Father to humanity, but showing Him up.

Michael Patton, a man I respect immensely, has just reminded his readers that, “The palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity.”

This is a principle based in logic, of course. As a case in point (which was probably also his post’s inspiration), he brings up many Christians’ emphasis on the love of God disproportionate to their acknowledgment of the wrath of God. He defends the Reformed view of God’s nature and character by his playfully caricatured example of an objection:

“God’s love? Oh yes, give me two helpings of that. God’s wrath? Pass. I don’t have enough room and it does not sound good. God’s grace will be great, but I will have to skip the atonement—too bloody and odd. Predestination? Sovereign election? No way!”

In the end, he admits that, “For the most part, I find Christianity very palatable. Grace, love, righteousness, our future hope, the restoration of all things, etc. are all doctrines that I would gladly take from a smörgåsbord. But,” and this is his main point,

when it comes to things that are not quite so palatable and lovely, I must take them too as my final authority is not that which is reasonable to my taste buds, but that which God has revealed in His word.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. That sentiment is fully consistent with a view of Christianity that views the Bible as the final, crystalized, and most importantly complete version of all truth, revealed personally by God. But if we are more consistent in the typical Evangelical belief in “progressive revelation”, which despite arguable limitations correctly acknowledges mankind’s understanding of God as a trajectory, jet-powered and steered by the example of His Word, Jesus of Nazareth, we find less justification to ignore the nuanced sense of God found in the New Testament even in the interests of bowing to the authority of texts that speak of God as a wrathful deity perpetually on the warpath against those who transgress His moral code.

There are certainly plenty of those texts. And let’s be clear: the Old Testament repeatedly describes God as merciful, overflowing with lovingkindness and tender mercies, and in the New Testament we do indeed hear much of a coming judgment said to be officiated by Jesus himself. But who can doubt that the understanding of God in the New Testament has developed more fully into a God for all humanity and not only Israel, a God who sends His shepherd out to seek and save the lost?

“Ah, but there is still judgment against sin, even in Jesus’ own teachings.” The point I am making does not erase the wrath of God, but it does focus it on things other than mere abstract moral transgressions or ritual violations, and instead seems to target particularly those things which are harmful. Can we miss the fact that the judgment described in the Olivet Discourse is characterized as a punishment of specifically those who, even despite their outstanding morality and fidelity to prescribed rituals, utterly fail to fulfill God’s primary mission for them, which is revealed to be ministering to God by working in the interest of compassion? An intolerable system that fleeced the poor and obstructed the worship of the needy seems to have been the source of Jesus’ sole example of “wrath” in the Temple. (Note also that those endlessly tortured in the lake of fire in Revelation are not disobedient humans, but otherworldly forces of evil who have offended God most grievously by leading humanity away from Him.)

In a guideline largely alien to the Old Testament, Christians are told that they must imitate God’s character as nearly as possible. Yet although we are sundry times called to do so specifically by loving and forgiving one another, we are never told to be wrathful, to hold people to standards too high to reach, or harbor unforgiveness of those who have actually committed grave sins. We are instructed to be holy as He is holy, but are never led to demand holiness from one another except for the purposes of restoration. Paul tells the Corinthians to judge within their congregation, to be sure, but remediation is stated as the goal for church discipline in 1 Cor 5.5. If we are to judge those “inside” our community (v.12) in the hopes of eventual reformation, is it unthinkable that God should exercise His judgment on those “outside” (vv. 13) for the same reason, and more successfully?

So even if Michael Patton agrees with many other theologians among the Reformed that there are Scriptures that depict God as intent on inflicting a singularly loveless, hateful pain upon those who offend His standards, shouldn’t any theologian trying to understand God’s heart use the whole tenor and testimony of Scripture in order to do so? Are we not justified in being loathe to characterize God as a tyrant, individual scriptural illustrations of God’s anger notwithstanding? Should we put God’s love on par with God’s wrath as though one arm were extended to embrace the wayward son and the other to pitilessly strike him down?

Here I am being influenced by, or perhaps rather I am finding my lifelong suspicions unexpectedly articulated in, the ideas of George MacDonald. This passage from his sermon Justice (already referenced on this blog) makes the point that God would prefer us to err, since err we must, on the side of the most loving view of God we can imagine:

The lord of life complains of men for not judging right. To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God. To uphold a lie for God’s sake is to be against God, not for him. God cannot be lied for. He is the truth. The truth alone is on his side. While his child could not see the rectitude of a thing, he would infinitely rather, even if the thing were right, have him say, God could not do that thing, than have him believe that he did it. If the man were sure God did it, the thing he ought to say would be, ‘Then there must be something about it I do not know, which if I did know, I should see the thing quite differently.’ But where an evil thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing, and a lover of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he needs not mind being cast out, for it is into the company of Jesus. Where there is no ground to believe that God does a thing except that men who would explain God have believed and taught it, he is not a true man who accepts men against his own conscience of God. I acknowledge no authority calling upon me to believe a thing of God, which I could not be a man and believe right in my fellow-man. I will accept no explanation of any way of God which explanation involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man. If you say, That may be right of God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the Truth;–greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right. [emphasis mine]

This reminds me of one observation highlighted by Rachel Held Evans in her delightful new book Evolving in Monkey Town. “His ways are higher than our ways” is an oft quoted justification for claims made about God’s inexplicable behavior. What Evans notes is that this verse actually showcases God’s desire to show mercy, once that verse’s context within Isaiah 55 is identified: “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. ‘For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are you ways My ways,’ declares the Lord” (vv. 7-8). Evans explains:

Isaiah 55 provides an entirely different framework for thinking about God’s justice, because it suggests that we have it backward — the mystery lies not in God’s unfathomable wrath but in his unfathomable mercy. God’s ways are higher than our ways because his capacity to love is infinitely greater than our own. (p. 136)

And if this weren’t enough dynamic quotes for one post, I can’t resist recapitulating another that I posted as an entire entry a few days back, this time re-situated amongst the thoughts that prompted me to publish that entry in the first place. It’s from none other than the true father of the Reformed, St. Augustine, who nonetheless understood these points I have made and voiced them more succinctly and profoundly by far:

Whoever thinks he understands divine scripture or any part of it, but whose interpretation does not build up the twofold love of God and neighbor, has not really understood it. Whoever has drawn from scripture an interpretation that does fortify this love, but who is later proven not to have found the meaning intended by the author of the passage, is deceived to be sure, but not in a harmful way, and he is guilty of no untruth at all.

Without assuming, as the inerrantist must, that every Scripture speaks univocally, we may still recognize a clear emphasis upon love and forgiveness throughout the NT that we should not feel guilty about focusing on. In the Synoptics, Jesus is depicted identifying the greatest commandments as a love for God that is somehow codependent upon love for our neighbor; in John, the “new” commandment Jesus gives is to “love one another” as exemplified by his own love; in Paul, the greatest of all virtues – above faith itself – is “love” for one another after the model of God’s selfless love toward us; the author of 1 John feels comfortable defining God’s very nature in this way: “God is love”; another well known and perhaps only apparently contrastive description of God is found in Hebrews 12.28, where He is described as a “consuming fire” — but surely we must see in that metaphor the OT motif of a fire of refinement that eats away the impurities for the purposes of purification, not destruction.

If after all God’s wrath is a force of His nature dueling with His love, not subject to His love as MacDonald insisted, then surely we will be forgiven for upholding the noblest view of Him possible, that of a God who is, at bottom, Love personified — especially since such an understanding is securable by the deafening testimony of Scripture. Beyond our beliefs or our incredulity, our faithfulness or our failings, the greatest of these is still love.

I wanted to share this excellent article that answers, mostly via Scripture, many if not most of the arguments of Calvinism. In an admirable show of the author’s critical thinking, while he certainly rejects the Calvinist doctrine of election and predestination, he still refuses to embrace what he considers to be overwrought and unconvincing alternatives such as a corporate election, pleading ultimate ignorance:

Election is true, but is shrouded in deep mystery. It is one of the secret things that belong to the Lord our God (Deut. 29:29). Calvinists and Arminians both err when they make precise statements about the nature of election. God has not told us whether or not there are conditions attached to it and we should not venture into it with such bold assertions.

Now, while I’m fully in favor of admitting ignorance and not pretending certainty where none exists, I think that some of the mystery surrounding election and predestination is due more to misleading, uninformed readings of the NT than to an innate, intractable ambiguity there. In another display of reasonable thinking, the article’s author remarks, “Perhaps further theological works by thoughtful Christians will reveal a more satisfactory resting place for our convictions.” I happen to think that the understanding of election I’ve come to is fully credible and consistent with a fair treatment of the texts of Scripture, so I’d like to offer the following as a supplement to his otherwise extensive critique of Calvinism.

Recently I noticed a friend on Facebook referencing Exodus 33.18-19:

Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.” And the LORD said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the LORD, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

What probably piqued his curiosity (I conjecture — he made no comment) was the last sentence of this interesting passage, which was quoted by Paul in Romans 9.15 as part of a passage that has been famously championed by Reformed Christians to support the doctrines of predestination to life and reprobation.

While someone might be tempted, by way of synecdoche, to reference the Ex 33.19/Rom 9.15 quotation as a way of affirming God’s choice to save some and damn others, we should note that the negative aspect is wholly absent in the original Exodus passage: we have no clear indication that God’s remark, meant only to highlight His goodness manifesting as mercy, was intended to imply the converse of that mercy. Yet notice Paul’s creative use of this verse in Romans 9 to do something like that, when he sets up a contrast with God’s mercy and His dealing with Pharaoh, synthesizing the two in the statement, “Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden” (v. 18).

At any rate, Exodus 33.18-19 taken on its own terms is a far cry from ‘double predestination’. Here the emphasis is on broadening, not arbitrarily circumscribing, the scope of His merciful dealings with humanity. I believe that this is the key to election as articulated by Paul.

Only those insistent upon ignoring Paul’s overarching argument can find a subdivision of all humanity into two classes, “saved” and “damned” in Romans 9-11. We shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that the “vessels of honor, vessels of wrath” passage ends at Romans 9.22. On the contrary, Romans 9 through 11 is a sustained argument culminating in chapter 11: his point is that the “hardening” of Israel described in chapter 9 was only undertaken as a temporary measure and as a means to extend mercy to more, namely the Gentiles:

Again I ask: Did [the Jews] stumble so as to fall beyond recovery? Not at all! Rather, because of their transgression, salvation has come to the Gentiles to make Israel envious. But if their transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness bring! . . . Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. (Romans 11.11-12, 25)

Paul is saying that God only “hardened” the hearts of “natural”, ethnic Israel as a means to extend His grace outside ethnic Israel. Only recognizing this greater argument allows us to understand Paul’s justification of God in 9.18: “Therefore God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy – including that scoundrel Jacob and those scoundrels the Gentiles, like it or not – and He hardens whom He wants to harden – even His own chosen people, like it or not.”

But it doesn’t end there for those whose hearts He had hardened: “Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you [Gentiles], provided that you continue in his kindness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off. And if they do not persist in unbelief, they will be grafted in, for God is able to graft them in again” (11.22-23). This again shows continuity with Jeremiah 18, the background passage of the potter and the clay analogy in Romans 9, in which the potter refashions rather than discards the “marred”, uncooperative clay.

To recap, Paul’s argument is that God’s mercy is so great and unrestrainable that, at least in certain times in redemptive history (e.g. Esau vs. Jacob, Pharaoh vs. Israel, natural Israel vs. the believing Gentiles), He will even “harden” the hearts of some of His own people if by doing so it will further His redemptive plan. Yet even those “cut off” will be restored upon their repentance (presumably posthumously).

“Ok, that sounds good for Israel. But what of Esau? Pharaoh?”

Well, laying aside the not-insignificant fact that such stories are not even likely to have actually occurred historically, perhaps we should turn to Paul’s conclusion to his argument in 11.32:

For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

So what if He ends up extending mercy to all? Returning to the original intent of Exodus 33.19, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”

For Paul, the mere thought elicited a beautiful spontaneous doxology in the closing verses of that chapter (11.33-36):

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable his judgments,
and his paths beyond tracing out!
“Who has known the mind of the Lord?
Or who has been his counselor?”
“Who has ever given to God,
that God should repay him?”
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be the glory forever! Amen.

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.

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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.

Here’s an excerpt from the first part of a review of a book I’ve been interested in since I first heard about it. It’s from the New Perspective school of thinking, and at 1218 pages it promises to be an important work on the subject. The book is entitled, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, written by Douglas A. Campbell. The review itself, written by Dr. Richard Beck, is quite readable and easy to follow, although certainly lengthy enough.

According to Campbell, Justification Theory was the big mistake. When you read Paul through the lens of Justification Theory you get a wildly distorted Paul. And the debates within Pauline scholarship are created by this distorted Paul. This warped, funhouse mirror image of Paul. And if Justification Theory is wrong and alien to Paul then clarity might be achieved if we could read Paul through the spectacles he was wearing. To see Paul as he saw himself, not as we see him through the prism of Justification Theory. So Campbell’s project is twofold. First, show us the flaws of Justification Theory with a particular focus on how Justification Theory is implicated in the debates within Pauline scholarship. And, second, show us an alternative reading of Paul, one that approximates, as best we can, how Paul understood his own theology.

So what is Justification Theory?

First off, as a theory, Justification Theory is a way of explaining Paul. More specifically, it is a way of organizing the Pauline data–textual data mainly, but also historical, theological, anthropological and sociological data–in a way that makes sense of it all. And, like all theories, if Justification Theory creates more problems than it solves we grow dissatisfied with the theory and begin to wonder if a better theory should replace it.

Most Christians already know the broad outlines of Justification Theory. It is the consensus view on salvation, what it is and how it happens. A part of what Campbell does is to specify the theory in great detail, proposition by proposition, so that any disagreements about the theory can be taken up and debated point by point. But we don’t need to go into that amount of detail. I’ll paint the theory in broader strokes. In fact, I’ll summarize Campbell’s description of Justification Theory with a picture (click on it for a larger view):