The Faith of the New Testament: A Pauline Trajectory

By Roy A. Harrisville III

The importance of faith in Christianity cannot be denied, nor the arguments surrounding it. The crisis of faith that now grips the Western church necessitates a fresh look at its essential teachings. This study traces the trajectory of St. Paul's concept of faith in the rest of the New Testament in order to answer the question of how far and in what manner the other books of the New Testament agree or disagree with the Apostle of the Gentiles. Was St. Paul an outlier or an influencer? Common assumptions about faith and the language of faith are challenged in this study. Rather than giving simple voice to conventional presuppositions, this book wrestles with the origin and character of Christian faith and provides a provocative view that should spark renewed discussion about the heart of Christianity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781725294806

Roy A. Harrisville III

Roy A. Harrisville III has published several articles and is the author of The Figure of Abraham in the Epistles of Saint Paul (1992) and The Faith of Saint Paul: Transformative Gift of Divine Power (2019).

Book preview

Introduction

The western church is suffering from a crisis of faith. While churches in Africa and Asia continue to grow, church affiliation has declined markedly in the United States and Europe. This is a crisis of its own making. The church of Jesus Christ has always suffered more from its own adherents than from outsiders. This is not surprising since there has never been a golden age of the church in which every Christian was in perfect harmony with all others. Even Jesus had his Judas. In the long history of the church there have been numerous divisions that have caused consternation and conflict. This is not an indication of the inadequacy of the Christian faith, but of its lack and misconstruction. Humanity has forever been divided by geography, philosophy, language, taste, or preference. It is no wonder that religious differences also exist. Though the Christian faith is meant to overcome such things and give humankind a reason to live in this life by granting hope for the life to come, resistance to Christian faith and all it grants has ever been pandemic.

Christians are even divided on what that faith is. The way in which scholars and churchgoers speak of their faith varies widely and is often laced with presuppositions that resemble more a house of cards than a firm foundation. Since faith is central to the Christian life, a thorough and ongoing theological discussion about faith is needed that is based not on assumptions and presuppositions but on considered theological interpretation of the primary documents of that faith. For this reason, the current study, together with The Faith of St. Paul, is offered as an attempt to describe that faith as found in the New Testament.

The hope is that this study will be used by seminary students, pastors, priests, and informed readers who have an interest in how they understand their own Christian faith and articulate it to others.

The Faith of St. Paul

The Faith of St. Paul: Transformative Gift of Divine Power³ argued that the letters of St. Paul characterize Christian faith as a transformative gift of divine power. When the Apostle to the Gentiles speaks of his own faith (not possessively but relationally), he speaks in mystical terms of an indwelling Christ.⁴ For Paul, faith is not something produced by the individual but received as one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.⁵ His great exemplar of faith, the Old Testament patriarch, Abraham, did not work for his righteousness but was given it as a gift when he believed.⁶ St. Paul does not describe people coming to faith. Rather, he uses the language of faith coming to people.⁷ The word of God supplies the avenue by which this faith arrives.⁸ St. Paul writes to the Corinthians that they stand in his preaching, are being saved by it, and should . . . hold fast to the word I preached to you  . . .⁹ The word creates faith at the moment of hearing and when Paul writes to his audience about remaining in faith, it is the word that is doing its work yet again. Righteousness, or being made right with God, is not something that can be achieved through following the Law or any human effort, but is clearly a gift of God through faith in Christ Jesus.¹⁰ Faith is the avenue of this righteousness.¹¹ Such faith, in sufficient quantity, is powerful enough to move mountains.¹² Faith is a sphere of divine influence in which a Christian’s life is lived.¹³ The gift of faith is a transformative, dynamic presence in a person’s life, so much so that a new life is created.¹⁴

In St. Paul’s theology faith in Christ and being in Christ are one. Faith in Christ justifies because it is being in Christ, or rather, Christ in the believer. St. Paul describes this in Gal 2:20 when he writes that he no longer lives but Christ lives in him—all in faith. The current language of participation in Christ trivializes a faith that is much more than simply taking part in something or sharing in a bit of something. Weaker still is the description of participation as identification with a character in a novel.¹⁵ On the contrary, the faith of St. Paul is as total a personal experience as one is ever likely to have, which involves the whole person, all the time, everywhere, in every circumstance. Faith is at the center of the person and does not participate in the person but captures the person whole. That is why faith in Christ and being in Christ are the same.

It is this merging of faith in Christ and being in Christ that supplies the connection between St. Paul’s theology and his ethics. Faith in Christ propels one’s ethics and directs one’s life because faith actively works through love.¹⁶ This is why Paul can pepper his letters with ethical exhortations insisting that his readers walk by the Spirit.¹⁷ With the advent of faith comes the ability to act ethically and morally, together with the will do so as well. Only in faith are good works possible, as Adolf Schlatter wrote: "Ohne Glauben kein Werk  . . ."¹⁸

When St. Paul speaks of people who believe, including himself, he does not mean that he assumes faith to be something self-engendered. He never commands faith from his audience. Faith is a gift, as we have seen. But it is a gift in which a person resides and one which transforms that person into someone who actually does the believing. But this transformation does not come from within, but extra nos, outside the person. If we are to work through our own salvation with fear and trembling, we may do so only as God wills and works within us, as Paul says in Phil 2:12 and 13(!).¹⁹

Those who wish to emphasize some sort of human effort in faith need not assume that this faith is coerced or forced by God as though God drags people into heaven kicking and screaming. The Holy Spirit grants faith through the word, does not pound it into the person but reaches into the heart to remold the center of the person by overwhelming it with grace and mercy, so much so that one comes to realize the truth of the gospel, not by being forced into it, but by being loved into it. To use St. Paul’s language, it is like dying and rising, or becoming a new creation. The observation that many have not been regenerated through God’s love but have remained alienated from it comes about because we cannot see into a person’s heart nor can we predict with any certainty that at any moment in the future, even at the point of death, a person may succumb to God’s embrace. Indeed, more profound than the question why God does not save everyone, is the question why God saves anyone, for

"None is righteous, no, not one;

no one understands;

no one seeks for God.

All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;

no one does good.

Not even one."²⁰

Therefore, the Almighty is within his rights to condemn all. That he does not is astounding. That he should save a few, as with Noah and his family in Genesis, might make some rational sense. Instead, however, he chooses to create faith in thousands and millions. If one wishes to object that such a state of affairs is unjust and unworthy of a gracious God, there is a remedy that he has provided for those who have his gift of faith: spread the word. For it is the word of God that is the avenue and means of faith. St. Paul and all the writers of the New Testament knew this and that is why they spent so much effort to disseminate the gospel. If many are without the word and thus without hope, it is Christians who are to blame for hindering the word just as we resist God’s gift of faith through selfish fear and doubt.

Conversely, when one is confronted by the beauty of a gospel that declares that the Lord of the universe spent his life for mine, devotes himself to my welfare, and freely grants me new life in his name, then a new and undying hope arises in my heart that gives me the courage to live without fear of death, and without the awful notion that I am in any way responsible for my own destiny. When Abraham was told to go to a foreign land away from his family and past life, he went, not because he demanded the right to accept or reject the Almighty’s call, not because he calculated the credits and debits, but because he was called by a power he could not resist. The same holds true for the light at creation in Genesis 1:3 and the disciples’ calling in Mark 1:18. Paul of Tarsus did not conduct a formal study of the risen Lord’s call on the road to Damascus.²¹ He raised no objection, insisted on no personal rights, but surrendered to the call because he was powerless to do anything else and later even championed his weakness in the face of God’s grace.²² Because faith is always resisted due to fear and doubt, it is not until the Spirit calls through the word and reaches into the heart that a real transformation occurs from within.²³ The human being does not arrive in a neutral state from its mother’s womb. It does not come with a blank slate. Rather, we are born into a state of self-centrality in which we demand attention, however inconvenient, and inflict the due punishment of deafening cries when we are not met with our needs and desires. The self is ever at the ready to defend its autonomy before God and insist on the tiniest modicum of control even if it is only a momentary decision in the face of overwhelming love. When one is met by the gospel of Christ that comes as pure gift and grace, as something that changes the person from top to bottom, the self will always retort, But don’t I have some say in the matter? Don’t I have to do something? That is, as one professor of blessed memory was wont to say, The death rattle of the Old Adam.²⁴ The autonomy of the self forever seeks to retain its own imagined power and keep God at arm’s length until it is good and ready in its own time and pleasure to receive and accept the most valuable gift ever given.

Mysteriously, however, God is unwilling to allow this state of affairs to remain. Instead, he barges into life, calls whom he wills, transforms them, and sets them on a new path of selflessness. Such was the case for Saul of Tarsus when the risen Lord Jesus intercepted him in mid-stride.

Lastly, that encounter explains why St. Paul’s faith is unequivocally in Jesus Christ. The manner in which he states this ("the faith of Christ"²⁵), can easily be misunderstood when one assumes that faith is a human product. The attempt to read the phrase as Jesus’ faith, and thus fully credit the Lord with the achievement of salvation apart from mere human effort, is indeed commendable. But it is unnecessary and diminishes the Apostle’s emphasis on faith in Christ. It makes St. Paul an outlier in the New Testament, which is filled with explicit and implicit faith in Jesus.

The Faith of the New Testament: A Pauline Trajectory

This present study aims to regain a sense of the Christian faith from an investigation of its primary documents and to redirect discussion about faith from that of an unargued assumption of natural human ability to the miraculously transformational power of the Christian life. If the church is to survive its current crisis, faith must be properly understood as something far more than personal preference, choice, or attitude. It must be appreciated for its divine nature and creative ability. Above all, it must be understood as a divine gift.

Such a finding often clashes with the reasonable objection that faith must have some particle of personal volition. Americans, especially, are attuned to this rational view. But the New Testament does not witness to reason or rationality. Its witness is to the irrational love of a God who sheds his power and status to save ungrateful and rebellious creatures. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.²⁶ Therefore, it remains merely to describe what the New Testament presents and the way it presents it, whether or not that seems reasonable or commensurate with common sense.

The Faith of St. Paul was written to describe an understanding of the witness of St. Paul and to introduce readers to the inadequacies of unargued assumptions about faith that have driven the scholarly debate off track. In this present work an attempt is made to trace the trajectory of St. Paul’s understanding of faith through the rest of the New Testament investigating how and in what measure the other authors of Christian scripture adhered to or diverged from St. Paul’s language of faith (ἡ πίστις). Therefore, this is not a comprehensive study of faith and its cognates in the New Testament. It does not attempt a systematic doctrine of the Christian faith. It is a very limited, preliminary study that only seeks to describe and identify whether and to what extent the other writers of New Testament books have followed in the footsteps of Paul in their use of the concept of