Faith = Jesus?

What happens to Paul's doctrine of justification if "faith" in the phrase "justified by faith" is a name for Jesus, as it appears to be in Gal 3:23, 25, on analogy with the use of PISTOS as a name in Rev 19:11? Or, perhaps, if "faith" is shorthand for "faith of Jesus," understood in Hays's sense as "faithfulness of Jesus"?

This wouldn't undermine the Protestant insistence that faith is the proper human response to God, a point that can be established on the basis of all the passages that talk about our "believing into" Christ (Rom 4; Gal 2:16).

But this thesis would give a different coloration to the opposition of "works of the law" v. "faith":

Paul would be saying that we are not made acceptable to God by anything that the law accomplishes (through sacrifice, for instance), nor by our own personal obedience to the law, but by Jesus.

I find this possibility intriguing, but it doesn't seem to work exegetically. "Faith" throughout Rom 4 is governed by Abraham's belief (Gen 15:6).

Rom 3:28 might just work: God demonstrates His righteousness in justifying the one who is of the faith of Jesus (v. 26), and the fact that salvation comes through Jesus' work, not ours, excludes boasting (v. 27); justification, in short, comes through a law of Jesus' faithfulness rather than through a law of works. But this seems convoluted, and the passage seems to flow perfectly well if "faith" is taken as human belief.

Rom 5:1 seems redundant on this interpretation: Having been justified by Jesus, we have peace with God through Jesus.

Gal 3:24 also seems redundant: The law is the tutor to lead us to Christ, that we may be justified by Christ. The surrounding verses, however, lend some plausibility to taking "faith" as a reference to the historical work of Christ, since both vv. 23 and 25 speak of the "coming" of "faith." But Paul is certainly capable of using related terms, and even the same term, with different nuances in the same context.

Besides, there are clearly places where "works of the law" is opposed to "faith" as the human response (Gal 3:2, 5).

All in all, the thesis, on this initial survey, fails. But it keeps haunting my reading of Paul.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 02:37 PM

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