I am gearing up to write on models of the atonement: different ways to explain what Christ accomplished by dying on the cross. This is a big topic, and a contested one. Traditional understandings get a lot of flak these days. Rightly or wrongly? We will see. Here, I deal with a much smaller but related issue: the meaning of “faith of [or in] Christ”. Or should we translate, as some argue, “faithfulness of Christ”?
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The actual Greek words used are (transliterated) pistis christou. Paul uses the phrase about six times.
There are two questions here. First, the noun pistis can indeed mean both faith and faithfulness, depending on (surprise!) context. Which meaning should we assume here? I will come back to this.
Which Genitive?
The second question is about grammar. For christos, the Greek phrase uses the grammatical form that is called genitive, which in English is translated as “of Christ”. The genitive indicates that there is a relationship between two terms. There are numerous options for the kind of relationship that is being implied (for an overview, see Corey Keating’s ‘Common Uses of Genitive Case’). It is up to the interpreter to determine which of these fits best.
Two common uses are subjective and objective genitive. Let me explain.
When we read about the love of God, whether in English or Greek, we may immediately think of God’s love for us. The noun love is a verbal noun, that is, it is derived from a verb. It implies action. If it indeed refers to God’s love for us, the implied action is: God loves us, in which God is the subject. This is therefore called a subjective genitive.
However, if we would read that people went to the ends of the earth “for the love of God”, we sense that the phrase probably has a different meaning. Now it refers to the love that these people had for God: they loved God. God is the object of their love. Therefore, this is called an objective genitive.
The question, then, is: which genitive is intended in pistis christou?
Why Redefine?
The traditional understanding takes the phrase as an objective genitive and therefore translates “faith of Christ” or (most commonly) “faith in Christ”. There is pressure these days to assume a subjective genitive and translate “faithfulness of Christ”; it is argued that we are here dealing with Christ’s faith/faithfulness, not human faith with Christ as the object.
This makes quite a difference once we start talking about justification, which is precisely how Paul uses this phrase in, for instance, Galatians 2:16.
Are we justified by faith in Christ, that is justified by believing in Christ as the object of our faith? Or are we justified by the faithfulness of Christ? (Needless to say, the faithfulness of Christ and indeed his obedience is real and essential to salvation, so the idea of Christ’s faithfulness is true; at stake is whether Paul is referring to it here.)
Much ink has been spilt to defend the modern redefinition. Before we look at those passages where the phrase is used, I will briefly state the most important arguments and counterarguments:
1. Redundancy. The traditional interpretation leads to redundancy: Paul would unnecessarily repeat the idea of faith/believing within a single sentence.
Counterargument: As we will see, there is no real redundancy or pointless repetition.
2. Abraham’s faith. When Paul refers to the faith of Abraham in Romans 4:12 and 16, the genitive is obviously subjective: this is about Abraham’s faith. Likewise, in Romans 3:3, pistis theou (theou = “of God”) must be a subjective genitive. In fact, seeing that it makes no sense to speak of God’s faith, the phrase must mean faithfulness of God.
Counterargument: This is true, but the meaning of phrases like these always depends on context and must therefore be decided on a case-by-case basis. Besides, in these cases of Paul using a subjective genitive with faith, he always uses the article: it is “the faith of Abraham” (Horton 2018: ii, 422f). But when Paul uses pistis christou, it is always without the article, suggesting it carries a different meaning than “the faith/faithfulness of Christ”.
3. Anthropocentric and work-based. The traditional interpretation turns faith into a work which then becomes the basis for justification. It makes salvation anthropocentric because it depends on us rather than on God. Theologian Michael Horton (2018: ii, 418) quotes Richard Hays, a leading proponent of the new view, as “judging that the traditional reading ‘verges on blasphemous self-absorption in our own religious subjectivity.’”
Counterargument: Paul clearly understood faith in contrast to works of the law and therefore not as an alternative kind of work. Faith is never the basis for our salvation or justification, in the sense of “the reason for” justification. The reason always is Christ’s work. Faith is merely instrumental; it is the means through which we appropriate or take hold of Christ, the real reason for our justification. To put this differently: justified by faith is shorthand for justified through faith on the basis of what Christ has done.
Besides, Hays considerably overshoots his target. He implicates all the church fathers as being – in his terminology – blasphemously self-absorbed. For many of them, Greek was their first language, but they all understood pistis christou to mean faith in Christ. They did not even discuss the alternative as an option (see Horton 2018: ii, 426).
Pistis Christou in Context
What follows is a brief look at verses that include our phrase.
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it – the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ [pistis jesou christou] for all who believe … It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus [literally, the one out of pistis jesou]. (Rom. 3:21-26 ESV; cf. Gal. 3:22)
Notice the suspected redundancy in verse 22: through faith … for all who believe. The repetition makes sense, however: it serves to emphasise that this is for all, not only Jews but also Gentiles; it is far from pointless.
If pistis in verse 22 is faithfulness, does it also mean this in the remainder of Romans 3, where Paul continues to speak of “faith”? This increasingly works forced. It breaks down altogether in Romans 4, where Abraham is justified because he believed – not because of someone else’s faithfulness, but because of his faith.
We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ [pistis jesu christou], so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ [pistis christou] and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
… And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God [pistis … tou huiou tou theou, also a genitive], who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal. 2:15-20 ESV; see also Gal. 3:22)
This passage shows the absurdity of the redundancy argument. Verse 15 and 16 are full of repetition (justified and works of the law appear three times, faith of Christ twice, plus the related verb to believe). Repetition is deliberate, for the sake of emphasis, and does not prove any intent to indicate different meanings of the terms used.
Verse 16 makes clear that we believe in Christ and this leads us to be justified.
And if pistis in Galatians 2 means faithfulness, then what about Galatians 3:2 and 3:5? Do we receive the Spirit by the hearing of [Christ’s] faithfulness? That, however, would not match with Galatians 3:6, where again, as in 2:16, someone’s (Abraham’s) believing led to righteousness for himself.
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus [literally: knowledge of Christ Jesus] my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ [pistis christou], the righteousness from God that depends on faith. (Phil. 3:8f ESV)
Notice the phrase “knowledge of Christ Jesus”, another genitive, and obviously an objective one: it refers not to what Jesus knows but to knowing Jesus. Other than this, the passage does not obviously enable a clear decision one way or another. There is repetition (not redundancy), both of righteousness and of faith, but it seems odd to make a distinction in meaning (turning the first occurrence into “through Christ’s faithfulness”, while taking the second as “our faith”). Rather, the repetition here also brings emphasis: it depends on faith, not works or law.
I leave out Ephesians 3:12 (“faith of him”) because it is inconclusive. For good measure, I do include a passage in which Paul discusses “the righteousness based on faith” (Rom. 10:6) – lest anyone think this could mean “the righteousness based on [the] faithfulness [of Christ]”. Paul has this to say:
… if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” (Rom. 10:9-11 ESV)
Paul puts such an emphasis on believing here that some, perhaps, will wonder if this also “verges on blasphemous self-absorption in our own religious subjectivity” (Hays quoted in Horton 2018: ii, 418). Clearly, Paul sees faith as instrumental in salvation, and it is our faith that is meant. (A similar argument applies to Romans 1:16f. Do any or all of its three occurrences of faith mean faithfulness there? Hardly. They parallel the verb believe: salvation comes to all who believe.)
[Disclaimer: I actually like Richard Hays, and quite enjoyed his book, The Moral Vision of the New Testament. The quote is simply too good, however, not to abuse it.]
And faith is not a work, but the mistress and the life of all works. Where in all the world is there a man so foolish as to regard a promise made to him, or a testament given to him, as a good work which by his acceptance of it he renders to the testator? What heir will imagine he is doing his departed father a kindness by accepting the terms of the will and the inheritance bequeathed to him? What godless audacity is it, therefore, when we who are to receive the testament of God come as those who would perform a good work for Him!
Luther, Martin. Of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in: Works of Martin Luther with Introductions and Notes, 2 vols (Kindle Edition), II, p. 125
Pistis and Pisteuo
The verses listed above show no compelling reasons to choose faithfulness rather than faith. In contrast, there are good reasons to translate faith. Yes, pistis can mean faithfulness. But when speaking of salvation and justification, Paul also uses the verb to believe (pisteuo;different from the English words faith and to believe, in Greek noun and verb are derived from the same root). He freely moves back and forth between noun and verb (as in, for instance, Romans 4). And the verb does not, ever, mean to be faithful. For this, the Greek language uses different words. It always means to believe or to have faith.
It is therefore quite clear that Paul expects us to believe, and thereby assigns a role to our faith in Christ (apparently not thinking this blasphemous or self-absorbed). That he ever intended in such contexts to refer to “the faithfulness of Christ” by using very similar vocabulary, however, is not at all clear.
The editor of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, Moisés Silva, writes:
With regard to the debate as a whole, I happen to believe, naively perhaps, that the evidence is not all that ambiguous—or to put it more accurately, that the ambiguities in the data are plainly resolved by Paul’s many unambiguous statements. If by pistis Christou (which in isolation can indeed signify any number of things) the apostle had meant either “Christ’s faith” or “Christ’s faithfulness,” it would have been ridiculously easy for him to make that point clear beyond dispute. Among various possibilities, he could have, for example, indicated—in the same contexts—one or two ways in which Jesus believed and how those acts of faith were relevant to the matter at hand. Or he could have told us—again, in the same contexts—that his message of dikaiosynē (“righteousness, justification”) is true because Christos pistos estin (“Christ is faithful”). What could have been simpler? And considering the theological importance of this issue, one would think that he might have made a special effort to clarify matters.
Instead, if some scholars are to be believed, Paul did not have enough sense to realize that the phrase pistis Christou is ambiguous. And to make matters worse, he unwittingly misled his readers by using the verb pisteuō with Christos as direct object again and again in the very same passages that have the ambiguous phrase! His bungling proved spectacularly successful, for in the course of nearly two millennia, virtually every reader—including ancient scholars for whom Greek was their native language—understood the phrase to mean “faith in Christ” and gave no hint that it might mean something else. (Silva 2010: 311; for more on this, see the article on pisteuo in volume 3 of the New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis by Silva, 2014, esp. page 769)
I therefore stick with justified by faith – in Christ.
Why Does It Matter?
One wonders why so much effort is put into the redefinition of a phrase that is relatively rare. Michael Horton (2018: ii, 444f) suspects the real aim is a redefinition of justification by faith. “Faith of Christ” is merely the lever to move a much larger doctrine.
Putting one’s faith in Christ is replaced with participation in Christ (since we are saved by his faithfulness, not our faith) and joining God’s people. Based on this, the New Perspective on Paul, represented by people like N. T. Wright, redefines justification as an affirmation by God that someone is a member of the covenant community.
This goes against clear evidence that the term carries a legal or at least formal sense and means a declaration that someone is righteous or in the right. Which does not equal membership in God’s people. The latter is important as well. It is what justification makes possible. However, although justification and inclusion are closely related, they are not the same thing. Logically, justification or righteousness is a prerequisite for community membership: only those who are in the right (who are righteous) can stand before God in his holy presence (Ps. 15 and 24).
Of course, we are to join God’s people. But this is not possible without first being justified – which happens through faith (= believing) in Christ.
One More Thing: Faith as Allegiance
It is already a long text. However, I do not want to pass over another, very different way faith is being redefined (but I will be short on this one). Matthew Bates argues in Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (2017) that the Greek term pistis should be understood as allegiance. As the title of his book makes clear, he believes (pun intended) that we are saved by allegiance to Jesus the king.
Obviously, this aligns with the fact that pistis can indeed mean faithfulness. The gospel, so Bates, is not merely about forgiveness of sins, but also about Jesus as Lord and king. To this king we owe (a life of) loyalty and allegiance. After all, so Bates, in NT times, a gift required reciprocation; this was culturally expected. God likewise demands a return gift from us – so literally in the foreword to his book. This return gift is lived-out allegiance, which will be the basis for our “final salvation” (a repeated phrase in the book).
Bates (2017: 37f, note 16) also redefines the verb pisteuo, ‘to believe’. He renders ‘to give pistis’ or ‘to give allegiance’, even though the verb, as argued above, has a narrower range of meaning than the noun and therefore cannot mean this. Check John’s gospel, where the verb is used over a hundred times. It is not hard to see how poorly the redefinition fits.
Word meaning is not the only problem. Where does this redefinition take us? It makes for a huge shift. Faith is receptive. It does not count as a work because no merit or reward can be claimed for merely accepting a gift. The spotlight is on what – or who – is believed, not on the one believing.
But allegiance turns this around. It is about the one giving allegiance. It is effort. Under normal circumstances, at least some merit can be claimed through allegiance: we can boast in our allegiance, whereas it would be pointless to boast about having accepted a gift. Allegiance is a work. In Bates’ view, we are not justified by works (plural) of the law, but by a single type of work, namely allegiance.
Does anyone seriously want to base their justification on their allegiance? Good luck with that! I doubt your allegiance will save you; more likely, it will condemn you.
Yes, we owe allegiance. But we are incapable of good works, including allegiance, until we are saved and made new. Good works, including allegiance to Christ as Lord, are the fruit of justification, not its basis.
“Saved by allegiance” illustrates the importance of ‘bickering’ over such details. A lot more is at stake than subjective or objective genitive, faith or faithfulness. Get it wrong badly enough, and we move right back into another Babylonian captivity of the church, Luther’s image for the church of his day (worth reading).
Too bad Luther is not alive anymore; he would have had some interesting things to say about “saved by allegiance alone”.
Attribution
Ricky Turner. 2017 <https://unsplash.com/photos/5_fwgw-2JEE> CC0
Goh Rhy Yan. 2017 <https://unsplash.com/photos/7erinyJlw0Y> CC0
References
All Bible quotations from: The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. 2001 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles)
Bates, Matthew W. 2017. Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic)
Horton, Michael Scott. 2018. Justification, New Studies in Dogmatics, 2 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan)
Keating, Corey. 2004. ‘Common Uses of Genitive Case’, Version 2.1 <https://www.ntgreek.org/pdf/genitive_case.pdf> [accessed 4 June 2020]
Silva, Moisés. 2010. ‘Review of The Faith of Jesus Christ: Exegetical, Biblical, and Theological Studies: The Pistis Christou Debate Edited by Michael F. Bird and Preston M. Sprinkle’, Themelios, 35, 309-311
——— (ed.). 2014. New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, 5 vols (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan)