Pistis Christou

Until the Reformation, virtually all translations of the New Testament translated the Pauline phrase pistis Christou as “the faith of Christ,” that is, the father exercised by Christ (a “subjective” genitive), rather than “faith in Christ” (an “objective” genitive). The Vulgate, for instance, straightforwardly rendered it as fide Christi . From the Reformation until the late twentieth century, Protestant interpreters hardly noticed that a subjective reading was possible. That all changed with the publication of Richard Hays’s seminal The Faith of Jesus Christ: The Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11 (The Biblical Resource Series) .

What is at stake in this discussion? According to Hays, a lot.

He denied that the debate was mainly syntactical, and argued that “we do better to speak . . . of a distinction between the christological and anthropological readings of pistis Christou . The christological reading highlights the salvific efficacy of Jesus Christ’s faith(fulness) for God’s people; the anthropological reading stresses the salvific efficacy of the human act of faith, directed toward Christ.” (To be clear, Hays does not deny that we must believe and trust in order to be justified.)

In the modern world, the post-Reformation anthropological reading of the phrase, and of Paul’s theology of justification more generally, has taken a liberal twist. Douglas Harink ( Paul among the Postliberals ) notes that modern Protestants after Schleiermacher focused attention on “the dynamics of faith.” Theologians well into the twentieth century “exhibit a common concern to explore the religious subject of theological inquiry, to understand faith in terms of a universal religious a priori . . . , and to introduce Jesus Christ into the discussion as a modifying feature or directional motif within the basic structure of religion or faith. In any case, the turn to the subject and the anthropocentrism of much of modern theology owes a great deal to teh noiton that salvation comes through ‘faith,’” faith understood not in terms of its object, Jesus Christ, but “as an intrinsic, essential dynamic of being human., which can be called upon to achieve a salvific relation to transcendent and worldly reality.”

A couple of observations. First, through post-Reformation theology interpreted the particular phrase in an “anthropological” sense, the emphasis placed on God-in-Christ as the object of faith exerted counter-pressure and kept Protestantism from collapsing into liberalism earlier than it did. But the anthropologically-oriented reading of Paul created tensions in Protestantism: A God-centered theology was disturbed by a tendency toward an anthropocentric soteriology. It’s not surprising that much modern Protestantism so readily adopted the post-Cartesian, post-Kantian turn to the subject. To many ears, Kant sounded Pauline.

Second, if the first point has some historical weight to it, then the turn to a more fully christological reading of Paul is an important “paradigm shift.” I do not endorse postliberalism in toto , since it retains some fundamental tenets of liberalism. It is ironic that some conservatives have viciously assaulted this shift. They defend a paradigm that was easily coopted by liberalism and reject a reading of Paul that provides, in some respects, a stronger bulwark against liberalism than traditional Protestant theology does.