A friend and I are currently reading this book. Here's an interesting quote from the end of chapter 1:
That message and missions [Paul's mission to the nations] is precisely about God's deliverance of the Gentiles from their former religious-sociopolitical allegiances, in order that they might give their unreserved loyalty (pistis) to the one God of Israel who has invaded their world in Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, in order that they might become a new people, under a new Lord and a new regime called the kingdom of God, the body of Christ, the ekklesia. That is justification. The Gentiles share in this new people and new regime by being baptized into the body of Christ and, in their newfound freedom from other gods and other lords, by becoming obedient and faithful to their Lord, repeating the pattern of his obedience and faithfulness in their whole way of life, in body and in soul, social and personal, active and passive, economic and political, within the body of Christ and as the body of Christ. That is faith. Their justification, therefore, is or ought to be immediately marked by a specific and visible way of being and living in the world as a social body. Every letter of Paul is oriented to that end; one searches in vain for any section within those letters that is not oriented to it. (emphasis is original)
At the core of this book and the first chapter is the discussion of the "rendering of the Greek phrase pistis Christou Iesou (Gal. 2:16 and its variants elsewhere)." Is this phrase to be understood as faith in or toward Jesus Christ with Jesus Christ as the object of the faith thus translating the phrase "faith in Jesus Christ" or is it a subjective genitive thus translating the phrase "the faith(fulness) of Christ."
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this issue and especially on the quote concerning faith and justification. Are those definitions that you can live with? How do you understand pistis Christou Iesou? Why do you understand it the way you do?
Filed in: books, quotes, theology, bible, hermeneutics
2 comments:
Now that's a bit of a false dichotomy there. If you read Paul's letter to the Romans in Greek, Paul makes an argument that our faith is based on God's faithfulness (looking at the other parallels he's drawing in the vicinity, when he says our righteousness is "from faith to faith" ... that comes to be from God's faithfulness to our faith/faithfulness).
Looking at what Paul said to the people of Athens (Acts 17), God "has given faith to all" by raising Christ from the dead, in which 'faith' here means 'rational basis for our trust'.
Thanks weekend fisher for your thoughts.
I'm not sure what you mean by a false dichotomy. Perhaps another post on this topic quoting more from the book is in order as the author of "Paul Among the Postliberals" clearly does see a dichotomy. From the book, here Harink quotes Richard Hays from "Pistis and Pauline Christology," 39-40, "Little is to be gained by rehearsing the familiar arguments about syntax...Such syntactical arguments are...finally inconclusive...Our interpretative decision about the meaning of Paul's phrase, therefore, must be governed by larger judgments about the shape and logic of Paul's thought concerning faith, Christ, and salvation. Indeed, rather than defining the debate as a dispute between subjective ["faith of"] and objective ["faith in"] genitive readings, we would do better to speak--as some recent essays have suggested--of a distinction between the christological and anthropological interpretations of pistis xristou. The christological reading highlights the salvific efficacy of Jesus Christ's faith(fulness) for God's people; the anthropological reading stresses the salvific efficacy of the human act of faith directed toward Christ."
Then Harink states, "In other words, each phrase in effect summarizes a different story." As I understand Harink, he is saying that justification can happen without faith as he indicates in a few of his section headings in the book: "The Gospel without Justification by Faith: Paul's Call" and "The Gospel with Works: Paul's Early Preaching to the Gentiles."
Post a Comment