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Faith as Trust (Not Just Belief) - Dr. Teresa Morgan
177 Plays2 years ago
What is Biblical faith? Is it a blind leap, a group of teachings, or an internal conviction? Dr. Teresa Morgan, Biblical scholar and author of Roman Faith and Christian Faith, discusses with Matt and Nick what the word translated "faith" (pistis) meant in Greco-Roman culture, how the Biblical authors used it, and how its use changed over time in Christian vocabulary. She addresses questions about pistis christou, allegiance, grace, and salvation by faith alone. She also gives her opinion on whether Augustine and the Reformers took the “faithfulness” out of “faith.”
Resources Referenced: Roman Faith and Christian Faith by Teresa Morgan, Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire by Teresa Morgan, Salvation by Allegiance Alone, by Matthew Bates, Paul and the Gift by John Barclay
Theme Music: "Believe" by Posthumorous. More at https://linktr.ee/posthumorous
For more fun, check out www.reparadigmed.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Teresa Morgan
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Re-Paradimed podcast. We're very excited to have Dr. Teresa Morgan on with us today. She's the McDonald Agape Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Yale Divinity School.
00:00:27
Speaker
Thanks for coming on the podcast today, Dr. Morgan. Hello, Matt and Nick, good to see you. So Dr. Morgan, you've done a lot of work around faith and trust. Today we'll be talking about your book, Roman Faith and Christian Faith. You said you've also published the New Testament and Theology of Trust, and these are part of kind of a four-part series. What got you so interested in studying trust and faith within Christianity?
00:00:50
Speaker
Yeah. Like a lot of research projects, it was a bit of an accident really. Years ago in 2007, I wrote a book on popular morality in the early Roman Empire. And that book was arguing that we can actually get at the ethical thinking of people below the level of the sort of social and intellectual elite who create most of our sources for antiquity.
00:01:13
Speaker
through things like fables and proverbs and exemplary stories and things like that. And I was also arguing that those sources show us that ordinary people had a loosely coherent set of ethical ideas. So you can talk about the moral system in loose terms among ordinary people in the ancient world. And because I was arguing about sort of giving an overview and arguing about the coherence of the sort of ethical system,
00:01:41
Speaker
I covered a lot of ethical ideas and practices and at the end of that back I thought what would really be good would be to take one or two of those things and just really drill down and look in detail at how they work you know where do they work in society in domestic contexts in you know friendship in commercial context in religious context you know where do they work well where do they not work at all where are they problematic where do people talk about them how do people talk about them you know and I was sort of
00:02:08
Speaker
thinking about various concepts and which would be good to do. And when I thought about Istis in Greek, Fides in Latin, these are the terms that basically mean trust, trustworthiness, faithfulness, good faith, all those sort of relational concepts. They can also sometimes not that commonly, but sometimes mean belief. They can also mean a whole other set of things like a token of trust, a physical token of trust.
00:02:33
Speaker
or a guarantee or a pledge or a legal trust or a rhetorical proof. So they've got a wide range of meanings. However, they are also, the word suggests that Christians are taking a term in very common use in the world around them and turning it into something very specific.
00:02:52
Speaker
So I thought, well, that would be a good focus of interest. So let's have a look at how trust and its relatives work in the ancient world, in the Roman world. And then let's see what Christians do to make it so distinctive. So I wrote a book about trust and its relatives in the early Roman Empire and in very early Christian communities.
Exploring Trust and Faith in Early Christianity
00:03:12
Speaker
And this is really the first and early second century. So
00:03:15
Speaker
pretty much entirely in Greek. And what I found, and what this book Roman faith and Christian faith, which emerged, argued was that actually at the very beginnings of Christianity, Christians use that language very much like everybody else does.
00:03:31
Speaker
What happens is that through time, it evolves into something very distinctive. So I argue that at the very beginnings of the tradition, Christians, when they talk about Pisdis, they are really talking about trust, the relationship of trust between God and Christ and humanity, faithfulness to God and Christ, entrustedness by God and Christ. And then through time, all sorts of other meanings get added.
00:03:56
Speaker
So that was where the project came from, but it turned really into something more interesting than I expected, which has been a lot of fun to work on. So you mentioned this idea of pistis. This word in Greek gets translated along with kind of its pistis word family several different ways in the New Testament. So for our listeners, even if they've never heard this term pistis before, they've certainly encountered its translations in much of their Bible study probably.
00:04:19
Speaker
I've got just a short list here for people. So, pistis is listed as a fruit of the Spirit. The armor of God includes the shield of pistis. Jesus warns the religious leaders, you have neglected the more important matters of the law, justice, mercy, and pistis. In 1 Corinthians 13, and now these three remain, pistis, hope, and love. In John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever puts pistis in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
00:04:46
Speaker
Ephesians 2.8, where just by grace you have been saved through pistis. And pistis is so central to Christianity, as you've mentioned in your book, that the movement eventually comes to be known simply as the pistis. What you've seen in kind of New Testament, very early Christianity, they tend to use this language in the same way that their culture around them does. So I guess can you talk to this kind of need and the importance to studying the way that this word gets used within their culture to help us and better understand what the biblical authors are trying to say?
00:05:15
Speaker
Yes, so perhaps starting with the wider culture and then moving on to the biblical authors. So there are two sort of background principles which are quite helpful to keep in mind here, I think. And one is a general principle about Christian language.
00:05:32
Speaker
Our evidence, our earliest evidence for Christianity is all written. It's all literary. It's some time before we begin to get images or evidence of practices, this kind of thing. So, you know, everything that, or material evidence, archaeological evidence, this kind of thing. So all our earliest evidence is mediated through languages. And our way into that language is
00:05:54
Speaker
what we know about the Greek language in general. These are texts of their time, of the community of Greek speakers in the early Roman imperial world. So that's the basis of our evidence. And when this new community is forming itself within that language community and within that world, the kind of sensible historical starting point, as it were, is to assume that they are using language in the same way as the world around them.
00:06:23
Speaker
It would be odd if a new community completely and immediately invented a new language, as it were. And it used a new language, invented a new language, using the words of the old language. Not least, of course, because people are preaching the good news. They're preaching this new understanding of God and of salvation.
00:06:43
Speaker
and they want to communicate with people. So it's in the interest of early Christian preachers and writers to be using shared language in a way that their audiences are going to understand. So that's a sort of general historical principle that our starting point for understanding New Testament language has got to be our understanding of Greek language in general. Now, that does not at all rule out the possibility that a small community can come to use, can use or can come to use,
00:07:10
Speaker
language in a new way. And that's exactly what I think Christians do. But what I don't want to assume, and I think I didn't find in Roman faith, was that that community was using that language in a new way immediately. Sure. And that's what we would expect really, we would expect a community to start using shared language in a shared way. And if it's evolved, it would evolve a bit through time. That said, I think we can already see the beginnings of that evolution in New Testament writings in the earliest writings that we have. So that's kind of interesting.
00:07:38
Speaker
So that's the sort of general thing about the language, you know, and how we approach the language of New Testament or early Christian writings. Another useful general thing in the background here is how people who study trust as a concept and a relationship in modern scholarship, think about it.
00:07:55
Speaker
And it's very widespread now to think about trust as either two place trust or three place trust, two dominant kinds of trust. There is also one place trust, but it's not so interesting for most purposes. So the really interesting ones now three place trust is when I trust you for something.
00:08:12
Speaker
X trust Y for something specific. So I trust you to go out and buy a pint of milk or whatever. Two place trust is when I simply trust you or we simply trust each other. And then trust is not for anything specific on a given occasion. It's just part of an ongoing relationship. And we might expect the relationship and the trust to change to evolve through time. And we might be very open to that possibility. But it's just an intrinsic thing between us.
00:08:40
Speaker
Okay. It just kind of defines that relationship or some aspect of that relationship. Exactly. And I think we can see that very nicely in the world of the early Roman Empire. So, Pistis language and Fide's language, which is very close in range of meaning to it in Latin, these terms refer to all kinds of sort of trust type, faithfulness, entrustedness, good faith type relationships, primarily. You know, those are the central, the earliest, and the most common meanings of those words. Not the only ones, but central. Come on.
00:09:09
Speaker
And we can also see that most trust, almost all trust probably in the early Roman Empire is either a trusting be for something or else it's just A and B have a trusting type of relationship. So that's the sort of background that I bring to the New Testament text. And then when you look at individual passages like the examples that you gave. So John, for instance, has a lot of passages that Jesus says, it talks about people failing to
The Role of Trust in the New Testament
00:09:38
Speaker
trust
00:09:39
Speaker
or everyone that trusts or believes has pissed you in in God comes to eternal life. Or in 14.1, he says, trust or believe in God, trust or believe also in me. Now, in most of those passages,
00:09:54
Speaker
I would tend to translate Pistuain as trust. And the reason for that is that what Jesus is inviting his followers into is a whole life and a life-changing relationship with God. It's because it's very strongly relational. It's not just about believing that certain things are true, it's about making a commitment
00:10:18
Speaker
I sometimes use an example to illustrate this because we talk a lot about believing in Jesus Christ, believing in God nowadays as Christians. But I try to give an example to illustrate the difference between believing and trusting in the ancient world. So, for instance, if you are Jewish at the time of early Christianity, you can believe that Abraham was taken up to heaven.
00:10:38
Speaker
or Enoch was taken into heaven and became identified with the Archangel Metatron, or you can believe that Elijah is in heaven and will return to Harald the Messiah, you can believe all those things are true about heavenly beings without worshipping them.
00:10:51
Speaker
bit of debate with exactly the parameters of worship in Judaism in this period, but basically people worship the one God. They do not worship angels and returning prophets and things. So there's a difference between what you believe about heavenly beings and who you worship or have a relational, that kind of life-committing relationship with. For Gentiles, in a sense, the difference is even clearer because
00:11:17
Speaker
Gentiles, regular polytheists, believed that hundreds of gods existed. They believed all sorts of things about all those gods without worshipping most of them at any one time, not least because many of them would be the gods of another tribe or another city, or a particular farm, or a god of something you didn't happen to need at this minute, like healing. So you can believe that loads of gods exist, but you don't worship them, you don't have a personal relationship with them.
00:11:44
Speaker
what early Christian preachers are calling people into is a personal relationship with God and with Christ, which is life-changing, life-committing, and you know, it involves the whole of your future hope. And that is more than belief. It will be more than belief for us really too. It's more than belief in this world. And when they use PISTIS language for that commitment, I think the only other alternative is really that we're talking about trust.
00:12:09
Speaker
Yeah, I'd like to read one quote out of your book here. Counterintuitive, as it may be, to modern sensibilities, when writings of this period portray pistis or fetus, their interest is scarcely at all in its interiority, but in its exterior, active, interactive, and productive aspects.
00:12:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'm trying to say that it's the relationship, the nature of the relationship. Then I think early Christian writers are not very introspective, really. They don't talk all that much about how it feels. Now, this is an interesting development because this is one of the areas where Christianity really develops a lot. So by the third and fourth century, your own faith can be a power that comes into your mind and fights your vices for you. It can be the boat on which you sail to salvation.
00:12:53
Speaker
through the stormy seas of life. It can be your own, not just the faith, not just Christianity, but your own faith inside you can be the ladder that you climb up to heaven. So there's a wealth of imagery develops in later Christianity, later ancient Christianity, which speaks to people thinking of themselves as having a really rich interior life of faith, which is terribly interesting, but that is not around in these very early texts. They're much interested in the relationality.
00:13:21
Speaker
which is an interesting point for Bible reading because your contention then is within the New Testament. We'll just say that earlier writings of the New Testament will leave the caveat for maybe where it was developing a little bit within the New Testament itself. But within the New Testament, generally speaking, a lot of this faith language is not so much what we think of in English as a believe about.
00:13:43
Speaker
but a trust in is where you're trying to get to. And maybe the believe language in English can sometimes, just depending on who is employing the word, it can sometimes connote a believe about and not so much a believe in, though it can do that as well.
Modern vs. Ancient Perspectives on Faith
00:14:00
Speaker
Yeah, now this is a really interesting point. And I tend to avoid the phrase believe in, because that in modern English in Christian talk is quite an ambiguous phrase, because it does have a strong cognitive component, you know, it does strongly suggest that we believe certain things, believe about.
00:14:20
Speaker
But for a lot of people, it also has a strong overtone of commitment. And that, I think, is to do with the fact that to believe in English has roots in Middle German beleban, which means to love. So belief starts out as kind of love and commitment language. But then it turns into more cognitive language. And so believe in English has got a kind of a fusion. It kind of allows us, if we want to, to think that
00:14:48
Speaker
our commitment is really entirely based on the content of our belief. And I think there is more to it than that. I think both belief and trust are involved for sure. But I think when we elide the trust aspect of faith,
00:15:04
Speaker
then we're losing something which is actually important to early Christians and still important to us. It's a very interesting thing. Trust has really fallen out of theological discourse, high level as it were, intellectually high level Christian discourse, really increasingly since late antiquity.
00:15:22
Speaker
But it's still there in popular Christian thinking. If you go online, you can see masses of books called things like Trusting God and Faithful to God. So the relational trust faithfulness has gone on actually being intuitively important to people without being in any way kind of theologized or really seriously addressed by Christian thinkers.
00:15:38
Speaker
that I think is very telling. People instinctively recognise that that's important. So I think the belief in, it allows you to just put a little bit too much emphasis on the believing that and not quite enough emphasis on the relational content, which is very trust focused.
00:15:54
Speaker
And so that's why I tend to try to talk about either trust or belief while recognizing both can be in play. And by the way, I mean, there are clearly New Testament passages where belief is what is in play. At 1 Corinthians 15, the beginning of that chapter where Paul says, I handed on to you what I was handed on to me, that Jesus Christ died for us, and that he was raised, that he appeared to the disciples. And he finishes that up by saying, so we preached, so I preached, and so you
00:16:23
Speaker
epistus at air. That must mean you believed because he's talking about the content to preach it. You mentioned even in your book in that context where it is referring to something that somebody would believe that's always for the purpose of a relationship and something that will ultimately be active and embodied.
00:16:39
Speaker
I think that's right. I think for someone like Paul, believing things is the basis for making your trust commitment. And it's kind of that way round. And one of the other very interesting developments in early Christianity is that that sequence gets flipped.
00:16:55
Speaker
So in Clement of Alexandria, in Origen, and then in many later writers, you will find them saying, well, trust is fine if you're not really very clever or very educated, you can't do anything else. You can't really understand very much. But if you're a smarter or educated person, then you move on from trust to believing things, and then you move on from belief to knowledge of God.
00:17:16
Speaker
And so starting with Clement and then going through a whole series of later Christian writers, you actually have this idea that trust is a kind of, you know, basic thing which is good enough for ordinary people, but belief is more sophisticated and more important and knowledge is even better. I think Paul would have been astonished by that, you know, because you believe stuff in order to make your trust commitment.
00:17:37
Speaker
Could we take a look at maybe a couple examples from within the Greco-Roman culture of what this Christus trust commitment would really look like so that we can get maybe an idea of, you know, when somebody in Greco-Roman culture, here's an early Christian saying, hey, Christus in Jesus is now what's key and central. How would they have understood that? What would that practically for them have meant needed to change in their life?
00:17:58
Speaker
Yeah, it's a really good question. Going back to this idea about three-place trust and two-place trust, I think the kind of pistis that people are being called to when they're being called to follow Christ has elements of both of those. As a general sort of definition, a modern philosopher might say that when we trust somebody, we put something, which might be a dollar to pay for a bite of milk, or it might be our life,
00:18:24
Speaker
in somebody else's hands. We put something important to us in somebody's hands in the knowledge or the belief or the hope or the guess, you know, the wager that they will fulfill that trust.
00:18:40
Speaker
they're able and willing to carry out what we trust them for. So one thing that people are being called to do is to put themselves in Christ's hands for salvation. So when you're being called to put your trust in Christ, you're being called to put your life and your existential hope into Christ's hands for your salvation. So that's a key thing. So the hope of salvation is a key element of what is bringing you to trust.
00:19:07
Speaker
But there might also be a two-place element of that, that you are being called to a relationship with Christ, which is intrinsically good, which is itself a new kind of life. And I think the language of new life and new creation is important here, which goes in John and to some extent in Paul in particular, with a kind of realized eschatology or an element of realized eschatology. So you put your trust in Jesus and you are in
00:19:35
Speaker
a new life, you're part of a new creation, and you're living differently. You're a different kind of person, you know, even before the end time, and whatever happens after the Prusia, you're already in a kind of a new life, in which you're living, you know, a different kind of set of relationships. First of all, with Christ, and because of that, then with all your other fellow Christians too. So those are two things that people are being called to, and they're being called to trust in Christ. I think there's another really important element, particularly for Gentiles,
00:20:05
Speaker
Well, at least there's no one which is slightly different for Gentiles and for Jews. If you are, say, Jewish and you are being called to put your trust in Jesus Christ, you already trust God if you're Jewish, but you are being called to trust in Jesus Christ as the Messiah specifically.
00:20:20
Speaker
So you're being called to recognize him and to believe that he is the Messiah and to trust in him because he's the Messiah. Now, if you're a Gentile, you're being called to that, which is quite strange to you, possibly if you're a Gentile, depending on how much you know about Judaism. But it could be quite strange to you as a Gentile. But you're being called to one other thing as well, which is important, and that is you're being called to let go all your other gods. So being called to put your trust, believe in and put your trust in Jesus.
00:20:47
Speaker
is a call to stop worshipping everybody else. And that, as we know for Gentiles, was quite a high bar. Because the natural instinct of any polytheist is always just to add another God. Sure. Which, if the language being used was simply a cognitive belief or just understand these facts about Jesus, it would have been very easy for somebody within this polytheism to simply add Jesus into the list.
00:21:12
Speaker
You can imagine Gentiles who say, okay, I'm fine. I'm perfectly happy to believe that Jesus Christ is another God. I just don't personally worship Him, which would not be Christian at all. Add Him to the Pantheon. Add Him to the Pantheon. Add Him to the list. Not a problem. You know, we can always have another God. It doesn't mean we worship Him. That would not do for Christians at all.
00:21:28
Speaker
So you've gotten this idea that to call somebody to Pistos in Jesus is relational. It's going to change the way that they live. There's a couple of specific relationships within Greco-Roman culture that you've pointed at, and you've explored the ways Pistos defines and manifests within these relationships. I found this really helpful. Could you talk a little bit about what Pistos would look like within a family relationship?
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah. So again, I think it's got this two-place and three-place aspect. So you might trust your husband to make a living, to run the family farm or the family business or whatever it is. You trust your wife to run a household, to look after your slaves and your children, whatever, to do the weaving, produce cloth for everybody and make clothes for everybody, this kind of thing. So there's an element of kind of role-based trust in families.
00:22:19
Speaker
But also, there's a strong sense in sources for this period that there's a lot of sort of two-place trust. There's a lot of trust that goes along with family affection and a sense of family solidarity. Interestingly, the family is one of the few places where trust is taken to work really well in this world. And it often looks like a kind of solidarity. So it's partly that you trust people to do
00:22:44
Speaker
their particular type of work, and it's partly just that you trust each other as a group. That's not only just necessarily two people, that's not just necessarily husbands and wives, but husbands and wives and slaves and children and all kinds of other dependents as a group would have that kind of solidarity. So it can have that aspect of community solidarity.
00:23:05
Speaker
And that same pistis language gets used a lot within military contexts. Can you talk a little bit about what maybe this would look like for a military where a pistis was strong versus maybe a situation where a military commander and his soldiers don't have that same amount of pistis and the kind of problems that might cause?
00:23:21
Speaker
Yeah, and military pistis was, or fides in the Roman army, was more of an issue in this period. So ideally, I think in an army, the rank and file soldiers, as it were, members of the legions or whatever they are, they have pistis or fides towards their commander, whether it's their centurion or their general or whoever it is. And that has a lot of loyalty, overtones of loyalty,
00:23:50
Speaker
a lot of overtones of obedience. Pistis can be quite close to obedience in some case. And that's quite interesting because Paul, for instance, uses pistis, I think, sometimes with a strong feeling of obedience about it. And he uses explicit language of obedience as well in proximity to pistis language. So there's a real element of obedience to God and obedience to Christ.
00:24:10
Speaker
Doesn't he say obedience of Pistis sometimes? Yeah, and there's a big argument about what exactly that means, but most people, I think, probably think that those two things are meant to be synonyms. The obedience of that is Pistis. Does it work? Yeah. So that's a good example. So in an army, a well-functioning army, Pistis has a lot of loyalty about it, a lot of obedience about it. You do what you're told.
00:24:33
Speaker
It can also have an element of, you know, actually trusting your commander personally, because some army commanders command personal trust and confidence. You know, that confidence might be a word we would bring in there. Another kind of closely related word. It's got the feed route in Latin, which is related to the FIDAs.
00:24:51
Speaker
So an army ideally has a lot of confidence in its general and that's a more kind of personal relationship and that's the thing that can sometimes go wrong. Relatively rare for armies to mutiny against their army commanders. What does happen in the Roman Empire is the armies mutiny against emperors.
00:25:09
Speaker
And there's only really rather sort of titular heads of their armies on the whole. But it's not that common for armies to revolt against their sort of practical in the field commanders, but it is kind of theoretically imaginable. And that might happen if you lose the sort of your personal confidence in a commander. Interestingly, and of course, armies both ancient and modern have a really strong ethic of the chain of command and the importance of obedience.
00:25:35
Speaker
And so trust actually tends to be talked about more from the bottom up than from the top down in armies. But I think there's also an implication that ideally an army commander has to be able to trust their troops that they will carry out commands. But that is less talked about. It's more talked about from the bottom up.
00:25:54
Speaker
Yeah. So it sounds like from the Emperor's perspective that Pestus or Fides, that his military has towards him, would be both very important and maybe something that can be fragile or dangerous if it's not functioning well. Yeah. In general, there is a very strong theme in writings from the early Roman principle, the early Roman Empire, that emperors are not trustworthy and they're not trusted.
00:26:18
Speaker
You know, people are very doubtful about whether emperors are good people, reliable people, have the interest of their subjects at heart, you know, very doubtful indeed. Unlike today where we all trust our governments implicitly. Quite uncomfortable residences for the present time.
00:26:38
Speaker
So what we've seen, especially early church, this Greco-Roman culture is that Pistis has very much this idea of relational, it's active, it informs the way people live and communicate and interact with other people. But you mentioned that later, especially with Augustine and other writers, that we tend to see Pistis, or well, I guess for Augustine it would be Fides, talked about in kind of different terms.
Augustine and the Relational Aspect of Faith
00:27:00
Speaker
Could you explain a little bit about what Fides is for Augustine and how that's different from maybe the New Testament authors would have used Pistis?
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah, now this is very interesting. And actually, I've changed my mind on this a bit since I wrote Roman Faith, because I'm now working on a later period. And I've done some work on Augustine. And so I'm sort of have a little bit more, a little bit more perhaps enthusiasm for his perspective than I did at that time. Anyway, in his multi volume book on the Trinity, Augustine has a famous passage in which he says there are two kinds of vidates, there are two kinds of faith.
00:27:34
Speaker
There is Fidei's huai, which is the faith which we believe. And by that, he means the faith in the sense of the body of teaching, the content of the faith. And then there is Fidei's qua, which is the faith by which we believe, which is the thing that goes on in our mind and heart. So he appears to have this view of faith that it's either, you know, it's either the body of the teaching, the faith, or it is an attitude on our part. But what he doesn't talk about is the relationship.
00:28:04
Speaker
between us and God or us and Christ. He doesn't talk about, well he doesn't in that phrase appear to talk about kind of trust, the thing that connects us with God and Christ, which is very extraordinary and that has been a very influential formulation and to this day a lot of people would still
00:28:19
Speaker
think that that is how you define faith now. So I thought for a long time that that Augustine just has kind of missed out on the relational aspect of faith. Now I think this is not quite true. And he is actually in there are places where he talks about for days where I think he is actually clearly talking about a trust relationship, rather than
00:28:40
Speaker
either just either belief that something is true or the faith or simply an attitude that he has that is not necessarily connecting with god or with christ so there are places actually particularly in his early writings i think looking back on his how he came to be converted to christianity in his early
00:28:58
Speaker
experiences as a Christian. He talks quite a lot about how you have to trust your teachers, you have to trust the scriptures, you have to actually be open, and it has a lot to do with openness to teaching, openness to example, the example of people around you, people like Ambrose who impressed him deeply, and acceptance, being willing to accept something, take something on trust.
00:29:20
Speaker
actually take teaching, tradition, example of martyrs, of all the people in the tradition that you might look back to, to take all that on trust. Augustine, I think, perhaps more than anybody else in late antiquity, has a very subtle sense of how important that is, how important that acceptance and willing to take something on trust is. And so he does actually talk quite a lot about trust, particularly in that context. Now, he has also inherited
00:29:49
Speaker
the thinking of the Christian Platonists I was talking about earlier, like Clement and Origen and Cappadocians who were his near contemporaries. So there is also a bit of Augustine that thinks that you have to build on your trust by developing beliefs and then by developing knowledge. So he's got that side of him as well. But I think now that it is not fair to say that he doesn't think that trust is there at all.
00:30:13
Speaker
Yeah. Can I ask a really practical question? And just in case anyone's listening and they're kind of wondering, okay, this might be interesting, but I don't really see why this conversation matters that much for me as I'm reading my Bible or whatever. So let me set it up in this way. You hear evangelicals in America oftentimes say something like faith is believing without seeing or something like that. Or sometimes the implication is maybe sometimes faith is believing said propositions without seeing.
00:30:42
Speaker
Would that concept be foreign to Paul? Yes. Actually, I think it would. He does talk in two Corinthians four about, or the beginning of five, about walking by faith and not by sight. But there he is talking about the difference between earthly life and the life either after death or after the coming of Christ. So that's a slight difference. But Paul
00:31:08
Speaker
Paul always talks as if there are reasons to believe. So people experience the resurrection. People that you trust and respect experience the resurrection and reported it. He talks about the people to whom he preaches receiving the Spirit. And then he talks about their experience. He talks to the Thessalonians, for instance, about their experience of receiving the Spirit is a reason to have confidence in his preaching.
00:31:35
Speaker
So early writers, they always think that there are reasons why people believe things, believe the teaching they hear, believe the people that they hear preaching and trust them and then put their trust in Christ. And it is to do with accepting the stories about Jesus, accepting the resurrection experiences, recognizing the coherence of the reports about Jesus with what the Scriptures say about the Messiah.
00:32:02
Speaker
So you believe and then you trust what Isaiah says about the suffering servants say, or what anybody says about the coming Messiah is actually a prophecy about Jesus. And all those things are reasons to believe. So I think actually what you might call the leap of faith in the sense that the modern, fideistic sense, I believe even though I don't know, or even I believe because I can't know, that is actually one of the few aspects of Christian faith that I think has not quite developed by the end of antiquity.
00:32:32
Speaker
That's quite a late thing. In the ancient world, people always think there are reasons why you believe certain things and put your trust in and come to know things about God. It's not just a leap into the totally unknown.
00:32:47
Speaker
I'm sure you've spoken with Christians before who actually sometimes express that they think God actually approves more of the person who is taking a bigger leap into the unknown than the person who really hashes it out, thinks things through. It's almost as if God commends. The more blind the faith is, the more blind the leap is, God commends that more.
00:33:13
Speaker
I do hear it spoken of in that way, maybe in not those words, but you kind of get the sense that that's what people sometimes mean. It's almost as if they're reading Ephesians 2, 8, and 9 as, for by grace you have been saved through believing without seeing these propositions and that not of yourself is the gift of God.
00:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's quite helpful here to go back to the thing that Augustine is very interested in, which is acceptance, taking something on trust. So I don't think anybody in the ancient world thinks that faith is just a total leap in the dark, but a lot of people recognize that you believe things and you put your trust in things that you can't prove as a human being.
00:33:58
Speaker
So revelation that comes from God, revelation of Christ, the revelation that comes through Christ and from Christ, and the revelation of the cross, the resurrection experiences of the teaching of the miracles, of Pentecost, of apostolic preaching, all those sequential revelations, those are things that you can't prove as a human being.
00:34:21
Speaker
on by human reason. So I think all ancient Christian writers would agree with modern human beings who say you can't prove the existence of God by human reason. You can't prove that Jesus is the Messiah by human reason. You can't prove the gospel is true by human reason and put your faith in it on that basis. So they would all agree with that. But they think that
00:34:44
Speaker
you can be open to the preaching of the gospel, and by accepting it, you can kind of experience its truth. You can come to understand its truth by being open to it, and then by kind of experiencing its truth. It changes your life. Paul and the New Testament authors probably thought that Jesus, the Messiah, or Yahweh, the God of heaven and earth, the God of Israel, was a trustworthy being, and so his promises are worthwhile trusting him because he's a trustworthy being.
00:35:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's absolutely right. And there is quite a strong theme in the Hebrew Bible that God is faithful. And because God is faithful, God is trustworthy. And the word that is used in the Septuagint in the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which is the Bible that most early Christians would have used, is pistos. So God is pistos, we're closely related to pistis. God is, and it means both faithful and trustworthy to God's people.
00:35:39
Speaker
So they're very much starting absolutely, they're absolutely starting from an assumption that God is trustworthy. And then God sends them this revelation about the Messiah, sends them the Messiah, sends them everything the Messiah is and does, sends them the preaching about the Messiah. And that's one key basis. You're absolutely right. Existing trust in God is one key basis for being open to and trusting in all these other things.
00:36:02
Speaker
So would it be fair to say that Pistis is built on kind of the things that we can see and know, but provides hope towards maybe those things that are beyond what we could see or know.
00:36:11
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you talked a little bit about the faithfulness of God there. I think that kind of launches us into a discussion on pistis Christu.
Debate: 'Pistis Christou' - Faithfulness or Faith in Christ?
00:36:19
Speaker
So for anybody who's followed any New Testament studies, especially around Paul recently, probably knows that there's a conversation going on around the phrase pistis Christu, which shows up several times in the New Testament in a lot of these kind of key passages where people look to understand what's necessary for justification or salvation.
00:36:37
Speaker
I'm going to read one of these passages, Romans 3, 21, 22, and instead of translating it like it's normal, I'm just going to leave this phrase as it is.
00:36:58
Speaker
So can you talk about kind of quickly the two main camps and the two approaches that have generally been taken to this and then kind of this third approach that you've proposed here?
00:37:07
Speaker
Yeah. So this is grammatically an ambiguous phrase. And most people think that it had thought that it was either a subjective genitive or an objective genitive in grammatical terms. In other words, that would mean that if it's a subjective genitive, it refers to the faithfulness of Christ. So piscus can mean faithfulness, faithfulness of Christ to God. Alternatively, if it's an objective genitive, it would refer to faith in Christ or trust or belief in Christ.
00:37:37
Speaker
by people. So there is also a third view, which is that it might refer to faith or trust or belief in the content of teaching about Christ, which people have suggested. So that's not a possibility. But mostly people think it is either about the faithfulness of Christ or God. And why this is interesting is because Paul uses this phrase in three passages in Romans three, you've just quoted,
00:38:02
Speaker
in Galatians 2 and in the middle of Galatians 2 and in the middle of Philippians 3, in three places where he's talking about what happens through the Christ event, what happens through the death of Christ. So this phrase is quite important for how we understand righteousness in Paul's language,
00:38:19
Speaker
or salvation actually to happen. It's really important for our understanding of atonement, of how God righteousness us, how we come back to our right relationship with God. So this is why it's much fought over. And if you think that the phrase means the faithfulness of Christ,
00:38:35
Speaker
then we are made righteous in the first place by Jesus' relationship with God, which we then come in on later, because at the end of that passage of Romans 3 that you were just quoting, there is a clear reference to our faith, our believing in Christ or trusting in Christ, I would say, our trusting in Christ. So that's always part of it. But it is the really key thing that happens on the cross
00:38:58
Speaker
know, to do with the relationship between Christ and God? Or is it to do with our trust in Christ? Is it our trust in Christ that kind of, you know, make in some sense makes real what happens on the cross? Now, on one level, on one level, there kind of isn't as much of an argument here as appears on the surface, because actually, all Christians have always thought
00:39:21
Speaker
that our coming back to our right relationship with God must depend on Christ's relationship with God and our relationship with Christ. On some level, everybody thinks that, you know, nobody thinks, well, unless, no, that's not quite true. If you're a double determinist and you think that, you know, everybody is either predetermined as saved or not saved, then actually it doesn't matter that much what you do, although your relationship with Christ is a sign that you're saved, but it's not getting you saved in the same way.
00:39:50
Speaker
But for everybody who is not a double determinist, which is most Christians, actually it matters both the relationship of Jesus with God and our relationship with Jesus. And I think it is very significant that the subjective genitive and the objective genitive camps have both got strong adherence because actually we need both of those things. So my solution is essentially to recognize the fact
00:40:13
Speaker
that histis is an intrinsically two-ended concept. If I trust you, it is because I think you are trustworthy. If you trust me, it's because you think I'm trustworthy. So trust and trustworthiness are always two ends of this
00:40:29
Speaker
relationship of the same relationship. So I have suggested that Paul is deliberately playing on that aspect of Christus, to say that Jesus has a relationship of trust with God in which he trusts God and God trusts him to even Messiah in the world, to bring people to God. But Jesus also has a relationship of trust with people, which is reflected in Paul's talking about our relationship of trust with
00:40:56
Speaker
him. I want to have it both ways, really. It is actually through his relationship with God and his relationship with people that he's able to restore people to God.
Trust and Grace: A Divine-Human Partnership
00:41:05
Speaker
So Paul's using this phrase that could be ambiguous. We're not quite sure if it's Jesus' relationship toward God or the relationship that we have with Jesus. And maybe he's employing that ambiguity because Jesus is actually stepping in to mediate not only our relationship to him or not only because he's acting faithful to God, but ultimately that Jesus, he restores the relationship between people and God through the faith and the faith.
00:41:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think he's deliberately playing on the fact that this phrase can have two meanings to say, actually, we need both. Yeah. And I've got some sort of justification for that outside Christian texts, because Christus is a quality that is always attributed to people like ambassadors
00:41:46
Speaker
mediators in legal cases, anybody who is mediating in any context really in the ancient world is always set to have pistis. And the point about that is that they have to trust both parties they're working with, but they have to be trusted by both parties they're working with as well, or it doesn't work. They can't mediate unless they have trust going two ways with both parties. And so I'm suggesting that that's
00:42:10
Speaker
I'm suggesting effectively that when Paul talks about the pistis of Jesus in connection with his death, it is very close to language that Paul also uses of Jesus as mediator.
00:42:21
Speaker
So Matthew Bates wrote a book called Salvation by Allegiance Alone. And by the title, you can kind of tell what his thesis is. And he's more or less just trying to jar us away maybe from the only the faith is believing content about God. Right. So he's trying to jar us toward something like seems it seems similar to something that you're trying to bring us toward. Do you more more or less appreciate what he's trying to do with his work?
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah, we have a very similar emphasis on the relationship, you know, the importance of the relationship between God and Christ and people, for sure. The reason I don't use allegiance, and I think there are passages in the New Testament where allegiance is a good translation of this.
00:43:05
Speaker
And particularly, I mentioned how close Paul Pistis is to obedience for Paul sometimes, and that Paul can talk in sort of language with a very faintly sort of military or administrative flavour, you know, where his Pistis towards Christ is a little bit like a kind of military.
00:43:23
Speaker
And that would be a good passage where allegiance language would work. The reason why I use faithfulness and trust rather than allegiance or loyalty, you could also use, this can be sometimes translated loyalty in wider Greek writing, is just that I think faithfulness and trust are broader.
00:43:41
Speaker
I think there are, I think they sort of allegiance and loyalty language, it very much reflects a certain type of, a certain aspect of faith. It's strongly related to obedience and doing what you're commanded. And I think that is for sure there in early Christian thinking.
00:43:58
Speaker
But I think it's not the whole of what faith is for early Christians. There is also a more kind of emotional and more personal aspect of faith. There's an aspect of faith as being entrusted with things as well as just being obedient and carrying out orders as it were.
00:44:15
Speaker
So I use trust and faithfulness to try and capture that there's a broad range of nuances to Istis language in different places. But I appreciate Matthew's work, which, by the way, he did before I published Roman Faith, so he didn't do it on the back of the work that I did. He did it separately and kind of in parallel. But we met after we had both been writing about it. And I appreciate his work very much.
00:44:38
Speaker
John Barclay wrote a book, Paul and the Gift, that came out I believe the same year as Roman faith and Christian faith. And he writes a lot about charis, this Greek word that usually gets translated grace. He basically argues that while grace was given without any prior condition, that it kind of comes with conditions.
00:44:55
Speaker
that it's expected to build a relationship. It's expected to have some embodied response from the people to whom it's given. I was struck, having read his work and your work, the expectation of grace in his book seems to match really closely with the idea of what pistis is in your work. Am I reading that right, or am I seeing something that
00:45:15
Speaker
know, I think you are. I think you can see John Barclay's book is particularly about Paul, not about all New Testament writings, but you can certainly see in Paul, I think. You can see Grace and Trust, Paul Harris and Pistis, kind of as parallel qualities of God. They work in a similar way, and they are also
00:45:36
Speaker
Charis, like Pistos, is one of these two-ended nouns that it can mean my generosity to you and your gratitude to me, or your grace to me and my gratitude to you. So they work in a similar way as kind of two-ended. And I think they operate in a similar way. They both start with God. God reaches out towards humanity with grace and with trust.
00:45:59
Speaker
and humanity is invited to respond and has to respond in order to kind of restore the relationship. And both of those things are mediated through Christ, so they're kind of a parallel. I don't think Paul ever gets into kind of which comes first. He just talks about God as enacting both really and as responding to both. So I don't think I, I mean, sometimes I wonder whether perhaps, you know, the grace of God comes first, but I don't think so, because I don't think you can say that one quality comes before another in God really, I think both.
00:46:27
Speaker
God reaches out with both grace and trust. Grace is an important concept for Paul because the language of Harris is closely related to charisma.
00:46:41
Speaker
and the charism which comes on Christians with the gift of the Holy Spirit. So that language is very much connected with the gift of the Spirit. And Pista's language is not quite so closely connected with the gift of the Spirit. It's just a different way of characterizing the relationship.
00:46:59
Speaker
as it were. So they kind of run in parallel, really, something that comes from God through Christ to people, to which people respond and which then has effects, ongoing effects in people's lives. Both expect and demand some kind of a response. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's absolutely true.
00:47:16
Speaker
The idea, especially when you're translating Pistis or something like that, especially in a salvation context, the idea of salvation by faith or even by faith alone is very important for a lot of
Revisiting 'By Faith Alone' in Modern Christianity
00:47:27
Speaker
people. That language, I'm not sure if it's literally carved in stone anywhere, it might be.
00:47:31
Speaker
I would bet on it, yes. I'm sure you could find it somewhere. I wouldn't be at all surprised. It's certainly in a lot of texts. Yes. So in a salvation context, if you're trying to teach somebody what pistis really means and what the biblical authors meant by pistis and how it gets lived out, are you okay with taking faith language and trying to help people understand this in a bigger, more embodied sense? Or do you think we're better served by just using other language, trust, faithfulness?
00:47:57
Speaker
Yeah, in other words, instead of translating Pistis's faith, usually always, are we better off just switching to something like trust or allegiance or something just to kind of waken us up to some bigger realities?
00:48:08
Speaker
I think it depends on context. So I think we can talk about faith in a modern Christian sense. And when we do that, I would just want us to remember that trust is an important part of it, just as belief is an important part of it. So I don't think when we talk about faith as modern Christians, we're not in danger of forgetting that belief is important. But we have been over the centuries in danger of forgetting that trust is important. So I would just want us to put the trust back into the whole complexity of faith. But I think also there are times when focusing on
00:48:37
Speaker
our particular aspect of faith is quite helpful in thinking about, you know, sometimes thinking about what it means to believe is important, sometimes thinking about what it means to trust is important. So there can be value in just separating out the different strands of faith. Also, you know, think about other strands of faith, there can be times when thinking about faith as
00:48:58
Speaker
a practice going to church is practicing your faith. It's important to think about that and the role of faith in worship, in communal worship, in sharing the Eucharist. So you can think about different aspects of faith and I just want trust to be remembered. I think I want us to recover the idea that trust is part of faith and talk about it as part of faith. Going back briefly to this idea of by faith alone, because this is worth thinking about a little bit.
00:49:23
Speaker
I would always want to say to people when talking about that phrase that it has been used in very different ways at different points in Christian history. So it comes from Paul originally, the beginnings of this idea.
00:49:38
Speaker
are from Paul and they crop up in Paul when Paul is making an argument about whether Gentiles have to keep the Jewish law, whether Gentiles who convert to Christianity have to keep the Jewish law and it's a very specific argument and he is arguing that they don't have to. Some other apostles think that they do have to, he thinks they shouldn't have to and so he makes this argument that Abraham had faith in
00:50:02
Speaker
Genesis 15.6. And that was reckoned to him for righteousness by God. And so Paul says, look, Abraham had faith, he didn't have to do anything. So he didn't have to keep the law because the law hadn't been given to Israel at that point, just had faith, and that was enough. You know, and so makes this argument that people that it's enough for the Gentiles to put their faith, their trust in God and in Christ, and they don't have to keep the law because he then develops this argument in the slightly
00:50:26
Speaker
in a different way in Romans by saying oh well of course the law anyway was added because people are sinful and then it made people more sinful and there's a whole other argument about what the law does which is actually not part of the original point you wanted to make. The original point is just that you know well Abraham said faith even before the law existed so it's fine just to have faith. If you're a gentile, if you're Jewish I think he assumes you'll probably keep keeping the law.
00:50:48
Speaker
that is a very specific argument. Now, come down, another famous figure associated with this phrase, come down to Augustine. He uses this phrase in a rather different way in his dispute with the British monk and spiritual director, Pelagius, because Augustine has this really strong feeling that people cannot save themselves. They can't do anything
00:51:12
Speaker
by themselves to elevate themselves out of their sinful humanity to a state of salvation. But Pelagius was a little bit of a sort of bootstrapping kind of a teacher and he was a little bit more confident that we had human beings still even fallen humanity had qualities which meant it could do something for itself.
00:51:29
Speaker
And Augustine really doesn't like this. And he overdrew the comparison between himself and Pelagius. But he develops the idea that it is only our faith that can help us. It is nothing we can do that can save us. Now, that is a different argument from the argument that Paul was making.
00:51:46
Speaker
Interesting. But because it's the same phrase, we kind of connect it, come down another few hundred years to the Protestant reformers of the Reformation, Luther and co. Now they use the phrase, salvation by faith alone, in a slightly different way, again, because their concern was with what they saw as the Catholic Church's abuse of good works. Right. The sacramentalism. Yeah. Yeah.
00:52:10
Speaker
either sacramentalism and also just to kind of you know really venal things like buying prayers and you know buying 12 years out of of poetry and this kind of thing and they thought that that constituted people trying to kind of engineer their salvation basically and so um so the reformers used this phrase by faith alone to emphasise again it was
00:52:32
Speaker
that it's your faith, not your church attendance, not the taking of the sacrament, not anything the sacrament does for you, not buying indulgences or anything like that, that is really the heart of Christianity. So that was really an argument about what they understood is the abuse of various practices or thinking about various practices. So this phrase by faith alone is used in very different ways at different times in Christian history. In between those times, when it is a very contentious phrase, we constantly find Christians
00:53:02
Speaker
asserting that, of course, you have to have faith and do good works as well. The idea, I mean, almost as soon as Paul had written, people were saying, well, of course, when he says that, he doesn't mean you shouldn't do good stuff. You shouldn't actually do good works. And throughout antiquity and into the modern world, there is a constant theme that you have to have faith and you have to live it out.
00:53:23
Speaker
James is the first person that we know of to push back against this phrasing board by saying, absolutely, faith that works is dead. Basically, that became one of the most popular quotes, biblical quotes in later antiquity. People always say, well, along with your faith, you have to behave like someone is being saved. You have to do good works for people. You have to live a Christian life. You have to support your community, do all those things. So in between the times when for various different reasons, people focus on the importance of faith or only faith, there is this
00:53:53
Speaker
constant underlying understanding in Christianity that you have to do stuff as well. I think it's fair to say that actually that nobody in Christian tradition has ever assumed that you're saved only by the way you behave. I mean, the idea that your trust, your responsive trust to God and Christ is fundamental. Everyone would agree that.
00:54:17
Speaker
I think school kids understand this. What you do is what you believe. What you say you believe, if that's not in alignment with what you do, well, you might say you believe it, but that's not actually what you believe, but that's not what you value most. It's not what you're a legion to. That's not what you're trusting.
00:54:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's not real. There's no limit to it. You're not making it real if you're not living it. So here's a question for you. Maybe this is sort of fun. And we can wrap up here because we've kept you over time. So in Augustine's argument with Pelagius, and then also in the Reformers' argument with the Catholic Church, in their cry for faith alone, did they take the faithfulness out of faith? And did Paul not do that in Ephesians 2?
00:54:58
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. In a way, well, I think Paul, when Paul is talking about Abraham's faith, say.
00:55:07
Speaker
I think he is talking very much about Abraham's commitment of trust, which he makes, of course, when God has promised him he's going to have children who are going to populate the land of Israel. And he hasn't had any children yet. And he's a bit cross about this and worried about it. And God reassures him, and then he has faith. So he is, it looks very much like trust. So Abraham is trusting of God. He is faithful to God because he goes on trusting him throughout his life, even before he has children.
00:55:35
Speaker
So I think for Paul, Abraham's faith is very much a trust and faithfulness kind of faith, which certainly also involves believing things about God for sure.
00:55:44
Speaker
For Augustine, I think it is a more complicated mixture of believing that certain things are true about God. Because this is after, by the time Augustine is writing, belief as defining what a Christian is, being defined by your beliefs as a Christian, is a lot more important. Belief becomes steadily more important through the ancient world, the ancient Christian world. So by the time Augustine is writing, believing things is a really important part of this. But I think trust is also in the mix.
00:56:14
Speaker
Ongoing faithfulness is not so much in the mix for Augustine when he's talking about salvation by faith alone, because he is really talking about what it is that gets you saved, not so much about your ongoing life of faith. When Paul talks about Abraham, he's interested in his whole life of faith, really. And he talks a bit about the whole life of faith, especially in Romans. But Augustine is much more interested in the faith that gets you saved, the kind of act of faith that gets you saved. So he's not so interested in talking about faithfulness.
00:56:42
Speaker
And I think that's true for the reformers, too. They're interested in sort of what it is that we think kind of gets us saved. They're not so interested in the life that we then live afterwards. I don't think they would deny that that was important, but just that's not their focus when they talk. But it does mean, I think, that for some modern Christians, the ongoing life of faithfulness and therefore the importance of actually action and works and those things falls out of the picture of it.
00:57:10
Speaker
simply because we follow the focus of the reformers often on that moment of what it is that gets you saying. Dr. Morgan, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today. We've been talking about the book, Moment Faith and Christian Faith. It's a book we would both highly recommend. Thank you so much. You have a great rest of the day. Thank you very much. Great to talk to you both. Have a good day. We appreciate it. Bye. Pleasure. Bye.