Abstract
This is a concise, lively study of pistis in Paul written by one of the younger generation of North American Evangelical scholars. Gupta’s primary aim is to show that pistis has a wider range of meanings than commonly recognized, a polyvalence obscured by the almost universal tendency to translate pistis as ‘faith’. In consequence, pistis gets reduced in meaning to the idea of religious belief, something primarily to do with doctrine. Observing (with Walter Brueggemann) that faith language in the Old Testament is embedded in the relationship of covenant and therefore entails not just cognitive assent but, even more, fidelity and obedience, Gupta argues that pistis in Paul displays a spectrum of meanings running from belief to faithfulness, loyalty and obedience, all predicated on a relationship of trust. In consequence, certain damaging polarities are overcome: such as between faith and obedience (‘works’), between divine grace as active and the human response as passive, and even, importantly, between ‘Judaism’ and ‘Christianity’.
Following a very brief survey of interpretations of faith in the history of Christian thought, Gupta looks at uses of pistis in Graeco-Roman and Hellenistic Jewish sources. He shows that pagan faith language was common to a wide variety of relationships, especially business dealings dependent on trust, and was by no means limited to matters of ‘religion’; also that the use of faith language per se does not distinguish Paul from his Jewish covenantal theological inheritance. As Gupta goes on to argue, what distinguishes Paul’s usage is the centrality accorded the trust relationship with Christ, a relationship that involves both belief and faithfulness manifest in obedience.
Chapters 5 to 9 on faith language in the Pauline epistles constitute the main body of the book. 1 Thessalonians and Philippians offer examples of pistis as the (military) virtue of loyalty able to sustain the believer in a context of suffering. The Corinthian correspondence displays the epistemological aspect of pistis: faith as a way of seeing reality in the light of the cross as the wisdom of God. The chapter on Galatians takes us to a nerve centre of interpretations of Paul’s faith language. Gupta broadly follows the New Perspective on Paul, according to which both Jews and Christians understood salvation as by divine grace within the relation of covenant, and therefore to set Christianity as a religion of faith over against Judaism as a religion of ‘works’ is a travesty. What is different, according to Gupta, is Paul’s separation of pistis from nomos (‘law’) in order to argue that the appropriate response to grace is no longer law observance but living according to the Christ relation, a mode of living that Gupta baptizes with the rather ungainly neologism ‘covenantal pistism’. Finally, s short chapter focuses interestingly on Paul’s interpretation of Habakkuk 2.4b in Romans 1.17 (‘The one who is righteous will live by faith’ (NRSV)).
The book brings the reader up to date on current Pauline scholarship on faith, including the debate over the phrase pistis Christou (Gal. 2.16; Rom 3.22), which Gupta translates, helpfully, as the ‘Christ-relationship’. Overall, the book will be of interest to anyone seeking an accessible introduction to ideas central not only to Paul but also to the history of Christian thought since the Protestant Reformation.