The seven preceding chapters represent an attempt to map Graeco-Roman pistis language, roughly divided in cosmological, mental, and social semantic domains. By distinguishing specific discourses in each domain, the breadth and versatility of the lexeme has come to the fore, which explicates at least part of pistis’s appeal to the Christ-movement in its earliest stages, as evidenced by the prominent place it occupies in the idiom of the apostle Paul.
Nevertheless, the polysemy of pistis is not an excuse to weigh each instance down with a multitude of meanings.1 This is why I insisted on differentiating between genuinely different semantic domains, even if sometimes more than one may be at play for Paul or for his actual first audience. Each of the preceding seven chapters drew on particular discourses to help understand particular passages in Paul’s letters in ways that are in keeping with both the author’s line of thought and the wider cultural frames elicited by the language used. And while the specific frame elicited in each passage may be contested, this study has demonstrated both that Paul’s pistis language partook in genuinely different semantic domains and that it is exegetically fruitful approach to further explore the implicit discourses at play.
In this concluding chapter, I will not repeat or summarize the specific exegetical results of reading Paul’s faith language against each of these discourses, as the final sections of the preceding chapters already fulfil this purpose. Instead, I focus on the overall outcomes and linger on one question in particular: what did Paul contribute to each of these discourses? Put differently, how do Paul’s discourses of faith differ from other views in his cultural and literary surroundings?
Without lapsing into the same ‘Paul versus the pagans’ or ‘Greek faith versus Jewish faith’ schemes I criticized before (see §1.3.1 and §5.2), it is valuable to contrast Paul’s faith with that of contemporaries. For although my method of reading Paul’s letters in light of ancient discourses inevitably led to a focus on similarities, authors never merely follow and repeat the topoi and discourses of their time; rather, they also, to varying degrees, contribute creatively to them or side with one particular ‘school’ more than with another. These divergences, however, cannot and should not be phrased in terms of simple dichotomies. This was observed by political philosopher Eric Voegelin in his lecture on ‘The Gospel and Culture’, when after formulating some of such divergences he states:
The understanding of these complexities by which the Gospel movement differs from the movement of Classic Philosophy, though, cannot be advanced by using such topical dichotomies as philosophy and religion, metaphysics and theology, reason and revelation, natural reason and supernaturalism, rationalism and irrationalism, and so forth. (Voegelin 1971, 77)
Instead of attributing such simple contrasts to Paul and ‘the philosophers’, then, it is better to look for more precise deviations that stand out only after the general pattern of a shared discourse is established.
This balance between convergence and accommodation on the one hand and divergence and innovation on the other is sensible both historically and theologically speaking.2 Whereas this book’s focus on Paul’s convergence with ancient culture in his usage of the pistis lexicon may have triggered some unease among theologically minded readers, picturing Paul, by contrast, as a sui generis author without equal is historically untenable. From a historical and literary perspective, the embeddedness of an author in her or his literary and cultural surroundings is an axiomatic truth. That said, even from a theological perspective, to find the early Christian message of faith embedded in the cultural discourses of its day is a conditio sine qua non. Incarnation, to name but one important Christian dogma, involves submission to the conditional, historical, and non-abstract nature of the cosmos. For the Word to live amongst us, it needs to take up concrete form; it needs to become flesh (to borrow a Johannine theme for a change). In Pauline terms, it needs to become empty of the divine existence and enter a particular human shape (Phil 2.7; Rom 8.3). On the other hand, for Paul to be the influential author he was historically received to be, or for his message to have been perceived as convincing and liberating (both historically and theologically speaking), he must have gone beyond what was at that point thought of as common answers to the main questions at hand.3
Thus, having responded to the question how Paul’s faith language made use of existing cultural and literary discourses (in chapters 2–8), we may now contemplate which additional answers he offered to some of the main questions of his day, discourse by discourse.
9.1 The Distinctiveness of Paul’s Contribution to Discourses of Pistis
The discourses I have discussed in Part I were concerned with large narratives on the ordering of the cosmos, both regarding the human knowledge of and relationship with the divine (chapter 2) and regarding creating a just society (chapter 3). From these more general discourses on the real and ideal outlook of the cosmos, we turned in Part II to pistis within the semantic domains pertaining to the mental life of human beings, further divided in epistemological, persuasive, and ethical domains (chapters 4, 5, and 6 respectively). In Part III, finally, I discussed discourses concerning concrete relational and societal questions: first the hierarchical, political, power-based relationships in which pistis was involved (chapter 7), then the group dynamics of communities described in terms of pistis (chapter 8). In the following subsections, which correspond to these three parts of this book, I will first pinpoint Paul’s creative appropriations of and additions to specific classical discourses.
At the end of each of the following three subsections, I will furthermore indicate what the present study contributes to the scholarly landscape. In the introductory chapter (chapter 1), I discussed three methodological insights that guided my journey and that distinguish it to a certain extent from other, related academic studies. First, there was the notion of semantic domains, which allowed me to sustain the polysemy of pistis instead of boiling it down to one meaning. Second, I found the method of discourse analysis helpful as a comparative textual approach built on the co-occurrence of key terms in Greek (and Latin) contemporary literature. By following the trail of the discourses, I was able to incorporate useful pagan material that was often consciously left out in earlier studies that focused on Jewish, particularly Old Testament contexts. Third, this trail led us into philosophical terrain that had been largely ‘uncharted’ as far as their usefulness for understanding Paul’s pistis language was concerned. Pistis usage in a variety of philosophical traditions helped to explain the variety, interconnectedness, and depth of use in Paul. Now it is time to reflect upon these results—the ‘view’, so to speak, from each of these vantage points. I will do so by comparing my overall emphases to the main outcomes of several other major publications on Paul and pistis in the twenty-first century.4
9.1.1 Cosmology
Mapping the human relationship with the divine (chapter 2)—Seeing as faith in the sense of ‘religious affiliation’ is a highly prototypical use of faith in our modern times, I started by peeling off some of some of these modern notions by exploring ancient discourses on religion, loosely understood as ‘discourses pertaining to the divine’. As it turned out, we found a highly useful first-order model in the ancient discourse called theologia tripartita, a threefold approach to the divine (a mythical-poetic, a civic-cultic, and a natural-philosophical one), which was used by a variety of authors from the late-republican and early imperial period. While all refer explicitly or implicitly to this tripartite division, these authors differed at least in part as to what approach was to be favoured and for what people the approaches were best suited. For instance, whereas Scaevola, presumably the pioneer of this discourse, deemed civic religion most important (as myth is untrue and philosophy superfluous), authors in the Platonic tradition put philosophical religion forward as a necessary beneficial influence that keeps the poets and the cultic legislators in check. Within this philosophical tradition, mythical representations were interpreted as allegories, and sacrificial cult was rephrased in terms of a mental sacrifice. According to my reconstruction of Dio Chrysostom’s contribution to the discourse, this ‘purifying potential’ was due to philosophy’s close affinity to our innate conception of the divine (as opposed to later acquired, image-based conceptions).
Whereas Paul never explicitly uses a trifold (or fourfold) division of how humans can approach the divine, there are several references to and evaluations of different types of religion in his letters. Building on the Platonic scepticism of mythical representations of the gods, he employs civic religious terms in a highly philosophized manner, transforming the language of cult to indicate a more cognitive, indeed philosophical type of worship. The main differences with the existing versions of the discourse are that (1) his critique of mythical and civic polytheist religion reaches beyond the familiar critique of it being a misrepresentation, to a more profound critique of the non-functional human mind as the origin of this religious misrepresentation (Rom 1.28); (2) he goes further than most in reformulating (and thus reforming) cultic actions into ‘reasonable worship’ (Rom 12.1); (3) he makes no distinction between intellectual elite and masses when it comes to making use of this more reasonable worship; and (4) he foregrounds pistis as the measure to guide this restored, philosophical religion he envisions (Rom 12.3).
The once failing and now renewed nous, ‘mind’, and the divine given ‘measure of pistis’ are two key distinctive ingredients of Paul’s formulation of this rather philosophical type of religion. Moreover, the availability of this renewed mind and divine measure of pistis to all the pisteuontes, all who responded and transformed their lives and worship accordingly, gave his message a democratizing effect. By using pistis as a philosophical-religious key term, Paul (and the early Christian movement he participated in) was thus pioneering new semantic territory, territory charted by Philo and explored within a Platonic context by Plutarch a century later. In essence, Paul’s religious use of pistis offered a philosophical alternative to cultic practice, and this religious and somewhat intellectualized use contributed to one of the most prototypical understandings of ‘faith’ today as a religious and cognitive term. To understand Paul’s pistis as a purely cognitive commitment in the modern sense, however, misses much of the original embeddedness—but we shall come back to this cognitive aspect in a moment.
Creating a just divine-human society (chapter 3)—Pistis not only takes central stage when it comes to re-imagining our approach to God; for Paul, it is the crucial enabler of a righteous divine-human society too. And again, we have seen that this is congruent with ancient discourses on utopian societies, such as the early days of Rome under Numa’s kingship. If the prevalent contemporary question therefore was how to attain such an ideal society once again, Paul’s ‘righteousness by faith’ language ought to be understood as an answer to this wider, societal, even cosmological question, not merely as an answer to the individual, anthropological problem of salvation. Moreover, it is likely that the answer Paul had in mind must be understood in terms of righteous rulership: a just society is reached by participating in the realm of a righteous ruler, who fully embodies the one, universal law and unites the nations. These ideas of a Golden Age which is to return under a just king, and of a type of unwritten law that (1) can be embodied in such a king, (2) is common to all, and (3) should be internal in all subjects, were already part of the cultural milieu of the period, shared across Greek, Roman, and Jewish identities.
So, wherein lies Paul’s distinctiveness when compared to the discourses of this semantic domain? Of course, Paul presented a particular person, Christ Jesus, as a faithful lord and as the ultimate answer to these expectations of the return of a new age of divine justice, which admittedly was a bold move given that this lord had been shamefully crucified. In doing so, however, he also combined all of these different (sub)discourses of unwritten law and explained how they worked together to actually enable a just society in the present, even while he and his addressees remained under foreign, Roman rule. For Paul, as for several philosophers of the day, the law exists not merely in written shapes, but may also take on internal, universal, and embodied (or ‘living’) form. Paul’s thought includes notions of an internal law, as the law may be written upon hearts: he alternatively describes this law as a ‘law of faith’ (Rom 3.27). He also describes this law of faith in universal terms, wherefore it excludes particular boasting and calls a new realm into being, bridging old ethnic boundaries (Rom 3.29–30). A third subcategory of unwritten law is its embodied state in Christ, who is the ultimate end of the law (Rom 10.4) and who is able to transform his subjects into his image, into righteous citizens of his heavenly realm (Phil 3.20–21). The novelty of Paul’s contribution is to be found not so much in the ingredients themselves as in the unique mixture of these discourses and, perhaps here also, in the prominent inclusion of faith language within his ‘unwritten law’ discourse. Faith is that fundamental disposition which enables followers of this ‘law’ to live a just life, to participate in the divine righteousness of Christ. Paul taught that it was the relationship of trust with Christ, the living law, that presented itself as a new internal ‘law of trust’, which at this point in time was in reach for all, Jews and Greeks alike, by becoming part of the family of trust.
When I compare the outcomes in these chapters to the findings of other recent scholarly contributions on faith in Paul, what stands out is that in the present work the divine-human dimension (set out in chapters 2–3) is seen as constitutive and primary for Paul’s overall pistis usage. The philosophical-religious positioning of the Pauline movement, based on Paul’s own description in Romans 12.1–3, is used as the starting point for exploring relevant cultural discourses, in line with the increasing scholarly awareness of the intertwining of religion and philosophy in the Hellenistic-Roman period (see §1.4.2 above).
The centrality of great narratives on the ordering of the cosmos is perhaps most consistent with Benjamin Schliesser’s emphasis on the ‘trans-subjectivity’ of pistis and his ‘cosmological interpretation’ of several Pauline passages (2007, 2016).5 In the present work, however, this cosmological dimension is firmly grounded in Graeco-Roman literary topics on how to know the gods and create a just society. These contemporary discourses also offer an interpretative frame for the combined usage of pistis as describing both a divine ‘event’ and an anthropological response, contrasts that puzzled Schliesser and many others before him. Perhaps more importantly, with lexical polyvalence as the present study’s starting point, such apparent contradictions prove not so problematic at all, as they are the consequence of the normal linguistic workings of a human brain.
The cosmic level is also taken into account in Teresa Morgan’s take on pistis (2015), where the final chapter is devoted specifically to this theme. This chapter is informed by a higher number of philosophical discourses than the rest of the book, such as the Stoic ideal city. Its central argument is that virtues such as pistis structure divine-human societies in both pagan and early Christian sources.6 The present study emphasizes the importance of philosophical discourses throughout the different semantic domains, yet revolves solely around Paul’s rather than a wider range of early Christian thought. This allowed me to focus on key Pauline topoi such as the triad of faith, righteousness, and the law, which I situated within this wider cosmic domain, focussing on the discourses of the Golden Age and natural law. Specifically, the ‘unwritten law’ discourse was found to offer a unifying concept to explain several aspects caught up in Paul’s ‘justification by faith’ topos: the importance of moral transformation (through an internal law), the transethnic scope (of universal law), and the role of Christ (as living law).
9.1.2 Mentality
Bridging the epistemological gap (chapter 4)—In the fourth chapter, I noted that a major philosophical discourse of Paul’s time concerns the problem of dualism, understood epistemologically and metaphysically as the inability of humans to attain immutable, divine levels of truth and knowledge. Pistis appears throughout this mostly Platonic discourse as a knowledge category, but (unlike what is often claimed) not, at least not unambiguously, as a low-level, unsubstantiated, fideistic kind. Based on his reading of crucial passages in the Septuagint, Paul’s contemporary Philo of Alexandria staged pistis as an important virtue in human dealings with God, whose transcendence had become more and more of an epistemological problem. As an intermediate knowledge category, pistis was able to bridge the gap to the ultimate. This middle-Platonist position is also taken up by Plutarch roughly a hundred years later, who uses a reasonable type of pistis not merely in epistemological contexts, but in religious contexts as well. Plutarch used pistis to overcome the challenge of complete scepticism and atheism on the one hand and the threat of gullible superstition on the other. This ‘trust’ thus offers a reasonable epistemological bridge to metaphysical truth as represented by the divine.
Paul fits within this phase of the Platonic, epistemological discourse in his use of pistis as an intermediate and intermediary cognitive attitude, reaching trough sensible objects for the divine, from whose trustworthiness the human pistis derives its stability. Just as in the Platonic scheme, it is very much an earthly category, capable of growth, but trumped and energized by love as the more enduring and heavenly type of knowledge. The ‘frailty’ of Pauline but also of Platonic pistis, then, is not due to its fideistic nature: Paul did not preach epistemic certainty based on a leap of faith into the complete unknown. Instead, the frailty of pistis is of an existential character, indicating the provisionality and precariousness of all human knowledge in the present state of the world.
Paul’s unique position within this discourse may be sought in a somewhat more temporal (and thereby perhaps more Stoic) interpretation of what was for most Platonists an everlasting (meta)physical problem.7 Paul lives in anticipation of being ‘fully known’ by God, and his eschatology includes the notion of Christ coming at some point to judge the world (1 Thes 1.10, Rom 2.16, Rom 14.10, 1 Cor 4.5). This caesura in diachronic time turns Paul’s conception of pistis into the divine-human relationship of the ‘now’, a particular ‘now’ lasting from the coming of pistis until its inevitable redundancy when ‘sight’ and everlasting ‘love’ takes over (cf. 2 Cor 5.7 and 1 Cor 13.13, discussed above).
Delineating credible persuasiveness (chapter 5)—In the next chapter within this ‘mental’ domain, I observed that the persuasive usage of pistis in the narrower, reified sense of ‘proof’ is well known and as ancient as rhetorical theory itself, with Aristotle as its main proponent (see §5.3.1). In the later Hellenistic-Roman period, a rhetorical usage of pistis gained the additional sense of ‘philosophical adherence’ amidst competing philosophical schools. In this philosophical milieu, pistis in a certain philosophical teacher or sage expresses both the mentality of being persuaded and the acknowledgement of a long-lasting relational allegiance. This cognitive-relational type of pistis furthermore served to distinguish sophistic, shallow processes of persuasion from philosophical, in-depth variants. This latter kind involves transformation of not merely one’s convictions, but also one’s life, such that persuasion takes shape in lived experience, in a life of virtue. When a Stoic sage develops such a state of persuasion (pistis), real friendships are made possible, as well as accommodation to less advanced students. An individual stable persuasion thus precedes truly other-regarding relationships.
I argued in this chapter that Paul participates to a high degree in these discourses concerning persuasion. He echoes the contemporary concern for sophistic rhetoric in his contrast between a divine and a human basis for faith (§5.4.2). He carefully negotiates the reciprocality of his relationship with his addressees and their ‘faith’ (see §5.4.4 on 2 Cor 1.24) and offers advice on how the strong may welcome the less advanced ‘in faith’ (Rom 14–15, see §5.4.5): pistis, for Paul and Stoics alike, needs to foster friendship and community, not ambition. Due to of the genre of the surviving material (letters to communities of followers), but also because of the social nature of Paul’s actual ‘community projects’, persuasion in Paul’s works is very much attuned to community building, even to a higher degree than the comparative sources I discussed from Stoic and Epicurean origin.
In passages such as Romans 14–15, Paul appears to refine the importance of pistis for some of his addressees and transform it from a merely personal conviction into an other-regarding virtue. Having a strong conviction (pistis) enables one to make room for those whose convictions do not meet one’s standards. Innovative in this regard is not Paul’s accommodation-discourse per se, but the fact that it employs pistis’s breadth of meanings. The Stoics would agree that one needs to have a stable conviction (pistis) in order to be reliable (pistos) as a friend and that goodness and badness may be defined as acting congruently or not with one’s own judgements. Paul, in addition, also calls such personal judgements pisteis. At the same time, he relativizes the right of the strong to act congruently with them, as this would exclude the weak from the faith community (Rom 14–15). Instead, they ought to welcome them ‘in faith’ (within this ‘pistis community’), just as Christ would. Thus, in Paul’s mind, pistis in the sense of a strong, cognitive conviction is directly connected to pistis denoting accommodating relationships of mutual trust. The strength of one’s pistis is not evidenced by a restrictive personal lifestyle, but by the generosity of accepting those with different convictions into a pistis community.
Practising virtue through imitation (chapter 6)—These relationships of trust are very much imitative relationships for Paul, by which we arrive at the topic of the subsequent chapter. In that regard, there is ample comparative material from Paul’s pagan contemporaries in which pistis represents either a virtue to imitate or the relationship between imitator and model. These discourses were most often of an educational and philosophical character. It was Philo who appears to have been the first to describe the virtue of pistis as a consequence of the action or attitude: trusting the ultimately trustworthy God instead of untrustworthy sensibles turned Abraham into a trustworthy person. This idea of becoming like one’s ultimate example is elaborated on across schools in the particular philosophical topos of ‘becoming like the divine’ (homoiōsis theōi) or, alternatively, ‘becoming like the exceptionally wise’ (homoiōsis sophōi). The Stoic Epictetus even included the notion of pistis in this more specific discourse and spoke about imitation in terms of becoming pistos, trustworthy, like the gods. I discussed (in §6.3.4) several perceived differences between the schools within this discourse, such as the issue of divine transcendence in Platonism versus divine immanence in Stoicism. The actual differences were slightly more subtle; according to my analysis, Platonism in the first and second century ad developed more immanent intermediaries between a transcendent God and mortal humanity. Moreover, in Platonism as opposed to Epicureanism, the philosophers were supposed to help other souls to achieve their level of ‘likeness’ to a deity.
Paul seems to follow this Middle-Platonic path to a large degree, even though some of the best verbal parallels of imitation in pistis are found in the Stoic tradition. In Paul’s case, Christ is the primary object of imitation, bridging the gap to the transcendent God, who is never described as a direct object of imitation. Moreover, Paul encourages his addressees to follow his own example and that of other faithful Christ-followers, building a chain of imitative relationships also found in the wider discourse. The pistis Christou passages in Paul’s letters were all shown to fit this semantic domain of imitation and virtue, with Christ functioning in a double role as both the ultimate paradigm of pistis in the sense of a faithful disposition to imitate and as a model in which his followers place their attitude of trust.
The distinctiveness of Paul’s model, however, lies in the importance of the incarnation. For Christ’s mediating position involves a radical role reversal between imitator and model: in order to become humanity’s model for faithfulness to God, Christ first played the part of a human being. This is particularly clear in Philippians, where Paul explains that he exchanged the shape of God (Phil 2.6: μορφὴ θεοῦ) for the shape of a slave (Phil 2.7: μορφὴ δούλου). Only thereafter and therein could he become a model for the Philippians to mimic in their disposition (Phil 2.5: τοῦτο φρονεῖτε ἐν ὑμῖν) and towards whose virtue of pistis the Philippians were called to ‘strive with one mind’ (Phil 1.27: μιᾷ ψυχῇ συναθλοῦντες τῇ πίστει, see §6.4.1 above). Unlike Platonic intermediary divinities or Stoic intermediary sages, Paul’s Christ not only precedes human beings and invites people to become virtuous, he actively came down from a divine to a human level first. This ‘degradation’ of the primary model had a levelling effect on those who became its followers, for imitating this Christ-faithfulness amounted to becoming just as ‘lowly’ and regarding others more ‘highly’ (Phil 2.3). For Paul, ‘becoming like God’ is not an attractive path upward, worth pursuing for the philosophical elite. Pauline homoiōsis Christōi involves a communal training in humility, worked out by God (Phil 2.13) and Christ who actively transforms his followers’ lowly body into the shape of his exalted body (Phil 3.21). Both the move of the divine downward and the active assistance to bring others upward are Pauline emphases unparalleled in the wider Graeco-Roman discourse of ‘becoming like God’.
Compared to Teresa Morgan’s work (esp. 2015), whose overall argument concerns pistis’s relationality, the present book aims to give a more prominent place to the ‘mentality’ of faith, by embedding specific Pauline passages in philosophical discourses of epistemology, persuasion and imitation.8 Still, not unlike Morgan, I understand this interiority or mentality of pistis as entwined with relational configurations. More specifically, interhuman relationships are required for processes of persuasion (see esp. §5.3.6), and education in virtue (see esp. §6.3.3 and §6.4.2), while vice versa, the interior cultivation of the virtue of pistis in individuals is essential for building healthy societal pistis-relationships (see esp. §7.3.6). These ‘mental’ colourings of pistis language thus help to establish Morgan’s general thesis that, in my own words, cognitive-propositional usage is always embedded in relationships of trust.
Nijay Gupta (2020) emphasized, in response to Morgan, that more cognitive and affectionate semantic options should not be overlooked. However, unlike in the present study, these cognitive understandings of faith become quite fideistic in Gupta’s exegesis of parts of 1 and 2 Corinthians (see my discussion in §5.4.2 and §4.4.3): for him, in more cognitive semantic frames, faith becomes ‘believing the unbelievable’ (2020, ch. 7). The pistis language in Graeco-Roman epistemological and rhetorical discourses offered plenty of evidence against such a fideistic reading, despite its popularity in both present-day popular semantics of faith (see §2.1 above) and in many scholarly evaluations of ancient faith as well (see §4.1). Trust is generally placed in what is believed to be trustworthy, and even in highly technical discourses on Platonic epistemology, pistis is a high-end category of knowledge for human beings, precisely because it is able to reach beyond the limitations of sense-perception towards what is certain.
9.1.3 Society
Giving and receiving in relationships of patronage (chapter 7)—In this chapter, I discussed pistis language in discourses of power and benefaction or, in one word, patronage. Indeed, many relationships characterized by pistis (or fides) were asymmetrical in nature, with a high-placed person or a conquering nation offering a relationship of support and mutual good faith to a less powerful other. The discourses on domestic patronage demonstrated the transjuridical potential of faith: faith regulates those areas that are not regulated by law. This juxtaposition may have prompted Paul’s suggestion that faith may take the place of ‘works of the law’. In philosophical discourses, moreover, it was lamented that enduring benefactory relationships of reciprocal good faith are turned into temporary business transactions: an internal gratitude and lasting trust is lacking. I read Paul’s famous juxtaposition of due wages in exchange for work versus a free gift in exchange for faith in this light (§7.4.4): Paul’s concern was not with offering a return to the divine gift in itself (faithfulness is a substantial return, not a ‘standing empty handed’), but with the nature of the relationship, which in his eyes should be a long-term commitment of benefaction and gratitude, instead of an ostentatious exchange of goods.
Particularly in Roman political discourses, the importance of fides Romana stood out. As a collective virtue and identity marker, this ‘good faith’ made up an important part of the Roman self-image, distinguishing them from faithless enemies yet at the same time offering to peacefully ‘incorporate’ those non-Romans who turned out equally faithful. When it comes to Paul’s participation in this discourse, the question is if Paul’s notion of ‘faith in Christ’ is best understood as a covertly anti-imperial statement and his ‘obedience of faith’ as a benign reversal of the enforced surrender into Roman fides. The answer I gave in this chapter is that Paul’s distinctiveness in this semantic domain does not lie so much in a reversal of what pistis entails. Both the Roman and the Pauline variant include a reasonable expectation of the benefactor’s good faith towards a less powerful other. The more obvious anti-imperial content of Paul’s gospel must be sought in the precise ‘lord’ proclaimed: at first sight a revolting, powerless, and now dead Galilean.
Yet, more importantly in the context of this study, Paul’s idea of the universal divine offer of reconciliation and of becoming righteous through faith (cf. Rom 5.1–2,11) is a more radical approach to divine benefaction than the Roman ideal. Roman fides is a transethnic virtue, an offer that extends to strangers and enemies of the state who turn out to be trustworthy. But Pauline pistis extends even further to the unworthy, to those who are initially without good faith, to the ‘godless’ (Rom 4.5: πιστεύοντι δὲ ἐπὶ τὸν δικαιοῦντα τὸν ἀσεβῆ; Rom 5.6: ὑπὲρ ἀσεβῶν), who are the opposite of ‘just’ (Rom 5.7: ὑπὲρ δικαίου). From Paul’s Jewish perspective, then, Rome is evidently among the godless enemies in need of the divine gift (charis) of peace and pistis, turning the tables on the Roman empire’s claim to faith.
Defining the self and negotiating the other (chapter 8)—In this final chapter, intra- and extra-group relationships determined by pistis were taken into consideration, in particular for those groups that were ‘religious’ in some sense. In the Graeco-Roman material containing pistis designations, I found a slight increase in its use for philosophical, mystical, and religious groups in the first and second century ad, including, for example, in descriptions of initiates into a cult. This increase seems to coincide with a growing henotheism in the period and perhaps also with a growing competition and critical dialogue between philosophical traditions. In polemical discourse between different philosophical traditions, apistia, ‘unfaithfulness’ or ‘lack of trust’, was often connected to mistrusting divine providence (against Epicureans). This latter use of apistia was found to be consistent with Paul’s usage of the same noun in Romans (Rom 11.20,23): it described the attitude of not trusting in the good news, namely in God’s benefaction to the nations.
Overall, however, the early Christian self-designation of pisteuontes/pistoi and the corresponding other-designation of apistoi turned out to be quite an innovation, and its abundant use is unprecedented in extant Greek sources. The scarcity of contemporary sources containing socially descriptive pistis designations (free from particular marked content) caused me to rethink the often-presumed meaning of Paul’s apistoi as ‘general unbelievers’. As such a linguistic innovation takes time, it seemed reasonable to see if the contexts affect and mark Paul’s pistis designations in a more precise fashion. The versatility of the pistis lexeme that was already evident from the preceding chapters was confirmed even in the case of pistis designations, whereby the different semantic colourings of the terms helped to explain the difference in tone between Paul’s insistence on accommodation to the ‘unpersuaded’ (1 Cor 14.22) and his warnings against allowing for morally or religiously ‘unfaithful’ people to gain influential positions in the community (1 Cor 6.6 and 2 Cor 6.14). Particularly in these latter passages in which religious unfaithfulness, i.e. idolatry, was at stake, Paul seemed to become more exclusivist in tone. This is in line with the increase in cultic and philosophical exclusivism of the period, as well as with Paul’s Jewish monotheism.
Yet, this wider development of religious exclusivist commitment may not fully account for the popularity of pistis as a common denominator for the early Christ-movement. Another explanation could be found in precisely the inclusive potential of the term: ‘all the pisteuontes’ is a recurring Pauline phrase to indicate that faith bridges divides between ethnicities (Jew, Greek), classes (slave, free), and genders (male, female) (cf. Gal 3.25–28). A third and final suggestion is that it was precisely the multifariousness of the pistis word group that ensured its appeal among early Christ-followers. Whether they intended to speak of a rhetorical persuadedness, ethical faithfulness, or philosophical-religious commitment to a deity or teaching, pistis served their collective need for a name that was, in all of these different meanings, well-received in their cultural milieu.
In these ‘societal’ chapters, the present study is in accordance with several major recent studies dealing with the semantics of pistis language in the ancient world. The focus on the relationality of pistis as foundational for understanding the whole semantic breadth was first put on the scholarly agenda by Teresa Morgan (2015). In the present study, Morgan’s thesis on the importance of interhuman relations for understanding early Christian pistis usage is confirmed by a discourse-analytical approach. Yet, compared to Morgan’s emphases and partly due to a different range of sources, the philosophical and literary ideals concerning such relationships are given more prominence here for understanding Paul’s argument.
Matthew Bates (2017) argued that when Paul uses pistis terminology, we ought to understand this as ‘allegiance’. In response, we need to emphasize that while ‘allegiance’ is ‘relational’ to a certain extent, it is too limiting to account for all the semantic variety set out in the preceding seven chapters. Even in dominantly hierarchical social frames, the term pistis (or fides) designates both the attitude and actions of the superior and those of the inferior party. It presupposes a reciprocity, whereby each partner is bound by the expectations of a pistis relationship. Hence, the relationship as a whole has salvific potential according to Paul, not the one-sided loyalty of a human being.
Thomas Schumacher (2012) offered a historical semantic analysis of pistis and fides language and uses this to understand its specific usage in Paul’s letters. As far as method is concerned, the present study uses a more synchronic starting point (see §1.2.2 above) and discusses pagan source material in closer detail and as constituting specific philosophical-religious discourses. One of the main contexts Schumacher emphasizes (2012, 2017), following Christian Strecker (2005) among others, is the Roman political use of fides in hierarchical relationships between leaders and subjects, armies, and nations. The relevance of this particular discourse is also highlighted and confirmed in the present work. Yet within this discourse, Schumacher identifies a contrast between Greek reciprocal pistis and Roman asymmetrical fides. As I have argued, this contrast appears to be unjustified, since Greek and Latin contributions to this discourse show no such contrast (see §7.2.2 and §7.3 above). Paul’s use of pistis is not different from Rome’s use of fides in an essential or semantic way. But it serves to emphasize a new logic of benefaction according to which Rome becomes the unworthy recipient instead of the powerful protector. Paul’s political usage of faith deprives Rome of its faith monopoly.
Nijay Gupta (2020) also added to the arguments for a more relational reading of pistis. According to him, faith language offered the perfect vehicle for understanding the Jewish notion of ‘covenant’ to pagans (see especially his eighth chapter on ‘Covenantal Pistism’), a suggestion also made by Morgan (2015, 291). The staggering amount of pistis and fides language in Roman political discourses would indeed confirm the appeal of the term in such contexts. But I would add that the potential of pistis to bridge cultural and ethnic divides in Roman discourses renders the choice of this term by Paul even more appropriate. Whereas a divine-human covenant is usually understood as connecting a specific deity to a specific people or nation, pistis language foregrounds God’s offer of grace to all peoples and nations. Moreover, if we take philosophical reflection on gift-giving into account (see §7.3.6), pistis language serves to emphasize the transjuridical nature of the offer: the gift is given regardless of worthiness of the receiver, anticipating a long-lasting interior attitude of trust.
This, in turn, confirms John Barclay’s overall thesis (2015) on the Pauline ‘perfection’ of the gift (as incongruent, not non-circular), yet without its somewhat meagre understanding of the role of pistis (see §7.2.4 above). Divine grace expects a return that consists precisely of upholding long-lasting commitment (pistis) on the side of the receiver, evidenced by faithful (pistos) actions.
9.2 A Pauline Response to Present-Day Discourses of Faith
Having evaluated both Paul’s contributions to historical discourses and this work’s contributions to scholarly discourses, it seems only appropriate to end this book by reflecting theologically and philosophically on the significance of Paul’s faith language to present-day discourses of faith. The semantic versatility of the pistis lexeme was exploited to an unprecedented extent by Paul, allowing it to, over the decades and centuries, make its mark upon each of the semantic domains in which it figured. In the early Christ-movement, faith came to be understood as an essential philosophical-religious quality, drawing its meaning and significance from cosmological, mental, and social domains, and in turn shaping our understanding of all these domains. What lessons can we learn today from Paul’s innovative pistis usage?
When we look at pistis as it is used in cosmological narratives (see Part I of this work), it becomes clear that it so foundational for understanding the world that it cannot be reduced to a ‘religious’ notion in the modern sense (or a cultic notion in the ancient sense for that matter). Pistis does not indicate something ‘religious’, understood as some separate sphere to be distinguished from secular, non-religious domains, and restricted to particular times, rites, laws, and places. Paul regards the present time as an age wherein a divine-human pistis has ‘come’ (Gal 3.23,25), which implies that the possibility has opened up of the whole world being made righteous again by entering a relationship of trust through Christ with God. Each sphere of life is thus open to being ‘righteoused’ or ‘renewed’ in light of this new ‘faithful’ and ‘trusting’ mode of living, including our relationship with the divine, with power, with family, with money, with work, with friendships, and so on. All of these spheres can be subjected to the ‘law of faith’ (Rom 3.27), evaluated according to the ‘measure of faith’ (Rom 12.3), and understood from within the ‘spirit of faith’ (2 Cor 4.13). Especially in the context of these broader narratives, we can detect the beginning of a usage of faith to indicate an all-encompassing, philosophical, and, for Paul in particular, a Christ-shaped ‘worldview’.9
Paul thereby invites us to recognize the importance of this pistis, this trusting commitment to what is ultimate, for our understanding the world we live in and the life we are supposed to lead. Consequently, within the highly pluriform societies many of us now live, it is important to recognize the profound implications of everyone’s ‘faith’, one’s fundamental attitude and commitment. Because of its fundamental nature, faith in this ‘cosmological’ or ‘worldview’ sense cannot simply be excluded from certain supposedly neutral public spheres. Instead, in political, educational, or healthcare settings, everyone’s pistis should be subject to an open conversation, as it is from one’s fundamental commitment that values, decisions, and actions are informed.
In the part on pistis language describing a person’s mentality (Part II), we saw that throughout classical discourses, it is a reasonable yet provisional type of cognition, specific to human beings. In current terminology, this accords with the idea that to have faith or trust is fundamental to being human. Even if the object and degree of trust is contested and negotiated differently from person to person, from birth to death, and from tradition to tradition; all human beings have such a fundamental disposition. It is from trust in our parents and caretakers that life is shaped at its premature stages. Similarly, for Paul, it is with a renewed pistis in Christ that a new life begins.
The provisionality of pistis as a ‘mentality’ implies that it is subject to human error, to risk and doubt: it is only as certain as the object of trust is trustworthy. The possibility of investing trust in the wrong person, deity, or teaching does not necessarily imply that the action of trust (be it ordinary or fundamental) is inherently unreasonable or blind. These conceptualizations of faith, popular in a wide variety of present-day discourses, seem to be the offspring of a modern (but not ancient) faith-reason opposition that is in dire need of revision.10 For Paul, an attitude of faith towards Christ is highly reasonable, as it consists of trusting the trustworthy, of pledging faith to the epitome of faithfulness: Christ is the one whose faithful life proves divine trustworthiness. Faith is thereby not totally at the mercy of untrustworthy sensible impressions, but is able to push the human boundaries of knowledge towards finding a secure anchor in the divine.
Faith is furthermore a profound type of persuasion for Paul, capable of transforming people into the image of the one in whom they invest this trust. A faith-relationship is thus never a one-way-street. Someone’s trustworthiness entices an attitude of trust, which in turn fosters the virtue of trustworthiness in the one who trusts. From its usage in educational and philosophical contexts, it is evident that the object of one’s faith is determinative for the type of person one becomes. The classical ‘economy of trust’ teaches us moderns that the level of trust in a political system is dependent on the trustworthiness embodied by its leaders and representatives, who are not only capable of evoking an attitude of trust amongst citizens, but also of sponsoring trust-relationships in all levels of society through chains of imitation.
This also implies that, from a Pauline perspective, ‘faith’ should not be intellectualized or propositionalized as though it is an intellectual acceptance of a statement. Instead, its predominant usage as a virtue in ancient sources demonstrates its capacity of transforming lives by practice, cultivation, and imitation in a communal setting. Within a Pauline pistis community, chains of interhuman imitation foster a community of people being transformed after the image of Christ. Seen in this light, present-day religious education (or missionary work) should not be limited to conveying, debating, and accepting cognitive truths, but it should be set-up in a ‘communal’ and reciprocal setting designed to foster and practise virtue.
From the usage of pistis in public contexts (see Part III of this work), it is evident that we should not think of faith as a purely private and personal conviction or, even worse, as an inherently intolerant and exclusionary cultural phenomenon. In the ancient discourses we encountered within this domain, pistis transcends societal divisions and shapes new, bridging communities of those trusting a particular teacher and teaching. Particularly in present-day pluriform societal contexts, with people coming from different backgrounds and systems with their own ‘laws’, the importance of pistis as a relational virtue stands out. As societies and political landscapes are becoming more and more ‘transactional’ in orientation, the sphere of ‘good faith’ offers a meaningful relational alternative. In pistis relationships, the basic attitude is one of an internally motivated, long-term commitment, and of ‘giving good gifts’ to one another, beyond what is juridically due or relationally risk-free.
Also, particularly within protestant faith communities, we may need to reconsider placing too great an emphasis on adhesion to specific religious ‘beliefs’ (see §5.4.5 on Romans 14–15) and instead, with Paul, foreground an attitude of welcoming others into a Christ-oriented trust. As pistis in Paul’s days had a ‘transethnic’ and ‘transjuridical’ orientation, the all-encompassing worldview that pistis became within Christian thought should never be used as an excuse to avoid meaningful dialogue with other traditions. Indeed, as a term so heavily invested in a variety of ancient cultural discourses, pistis invites us, now as much as in Paul’s days, to profoundly engage and connect with a variety of people and their philosophies.
All in all, by placing ‘faith’ at the heart of human existence, as a ‘measure’ for all areas of life, Paul invites us to rethink our relationship with reality on a fundamental level. Our mentality, community, and cosmology are formed by the objects of our trust. For Paul, the good life is a connected life lived out of pistis Christou.
Such an outcome, whereby every instance of pistis is understood as carrying all the distinctive ‘uses’ or ‘meanings’ (for instance ‘rhetorical proof’, ‘cognitive belief’, and ‘dispositional trustworthiness’ at the same time) would not pass James Barr’s famous critique of the illegitimate totality transfer, also called the ‘overload fallacy’. See Barr 1961, 218. From the cognitive linguistic approach that informed this study, it is clear that the contextual markers determine the semantic domain and thereby the ‘meaning’ of a particular instance of pistis language (see also §1.2 above). The only exceptions are cases of conscious, sustained ambiguity or playful language use, which I argued for in the case of Paul’s pistis Christou phrases (see §6.4.5).
Such a balance is also encouraged by Benjamin Schliesser at the end of his succinct summary of scholarly approaches to early Christian faith language (2017b, 45). He expects future research to ‘lay the primary force neither on the question of influences, dependencies, and genealogies of the early Christian concept of faith, nor in an apologetic manner on its unequivocal singularity and uniqueness’ but instead ‘acknowledges that Christian authors inhabited the same physical, cultural, and intellectual world as their contemporaries—and yet developed a distinctive conception of central identity-establishing tenets, such as faith.’
Cf. Voegelin 1971, 63: ‘It will be necessary, therefore, to recover the question to which, in Hellenistic-Roman culture, the Philosopher could understand the Gospel as the answer.’ Voegelin, however, speaks of a cultural ‘impasse in which the Gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher’s search for truth’, which seems an overly dramatic diagnosis.
In chapter 1, I traced the history of research back to earlier decades, and in chapters 2–8, I entered into dialogues on specific texts and semantic domains with more and less recent publications as well. Here, I focus on current academic conversations on the overall meaning of Paul’s pistis usage.
See Schliesser 2016, 282–283, 289; cf. his earlier monograph, esp. Schliesser 2007, 45–54.
See Morgan 2015, 473–500, chapter 12: ‘Pistis, Fides, and the Structure of Divine–Human Communities’; on the Stoic’ ideals, see 489–491. On Morgan’s overall scepticism as regards the influence of (at least non-Stoic) philosophical discourses, see §1.4.1 above.
The distinction, however, is not a clear-cut distinction between philosophical idealism and Jewish apocalypticism. See Tronier 2001 on the structural similarities between both and cf. on the overarching category of ‘axial age religion’, Klostergaard Petersen 2017a and 2017b, 19–24, both discussed in §4.3’s intro, above. Cf. also Atkins’ exposition of a mixture of ‘forensic’ and ‘cosmological’ eschatologies in the book Wisdom (2021, 612): ‘Wisdom innovates within Jewish apocalyptic tradition by employing the mythological idiom of apocalypticism to defend the philosophical claim that the cosmos is just and facilitates life for those who are likewise just.’
According to Morgan, the interiority of pistis ultimately ‘does not attract much interest in the first century’, especially when compared to Augustine’s thought and beyond (2015, 503). She does not say that the interiority is absent from first-century thought on pistis/fides, but rather that it is not a separate subject of study: it is always implied in its relational usages (cf. at 472).
I use the word ‘worldview’ (also ‘world view’) here not as an either Christian or non-Christian framework of assumptions (as it is sometimes used in present-day neo-Calvinist circles), but, more generally, as a fundamental attitude towards the world that may be configured in multiple ways and influenced by various philosophical traditions.
As the title of the overarching NWO-funded research project in which the current study finds its origin also suggests: ‘Overcoming the Faith-Reason Opposition: Pauline Pistis in Contemporary Philosophy’.