To say, God is our problem, does not mean that our primary problem is that we deserve punishment and only God can take care of it, it means that our deepest gifts and problems, our neuroses, personality formation, attitudes toward ourselves and others, is caught up in belief or unbelief about ultimate reality or about God, and these beliefs and denials are often wrong. Belief may not capture it, because this may be prior to belief, it may be the impetus to unbelief, but it is our deepest conception about reality. What we project upon God, perhaps even the God we do not believe in, contains the human sickness, and coming to see God rightly is very much involved with the cure. We may have to begin with unbelief, or denial of God, or what we do not believe so as to say what is we believe. Our image of God pertains to our image of everything, and coming to conceive God rightly is the goal of our life and faith, precisely because this contains everything about our conception of the world. This interpretation of all things according to faith, rightly conceived, is captured in the biblical notion of the “rule of faith” (Rom 3:27, which the Church Fathers will also call the “rule of truth” or the “rule of love”). Paul is pitting his rule of faith against what is obvious about God, or seemingly so, as he is vengeful, law bound, and this is seen by everybody: “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them” (Rom 1:18-19).[1] This legal, seen, naturally revealed, hermeneutic, working within everyone, stands juxtaposed to the “rule of faith” (regula fidei). This rule is the regula or the regulating mode of conception, a basic premise for reading scripture, and the premise in which scripture is constituted, which suspends a “works of the law” conception. We are naturally given, perhaps due to sin, to a perverse notion of God and the world, and this perception is to be relinquished through the gospel. How this works out in our lives may be a slow process.
Learning to See God Through the Rule of Faith: The Case of John Ashworth and Maximus the Confessor
This struck me in interviewing John Ashworth, a priest, missionary, and peacemaker working in Sudan in Africa. John was suffering from PTSD, having been put in front of a firing squad, after being kidnapped and held hostage. Having experienced many levels of horrific violence, the church gave him leave to undergo recovery. John described to us in an interview, and also describes in his autobiography, his work with a gifted therapist, an elderly nun, who offered “unconditional non-judgemental love” whose “favourite image of God was ‘Beloved’.” He writes, “She led me through a process of examining my own images of God, until one day I was able to say to her, ‘I don’t believe in God any more!’ She was delighted! ‘Excellent! Now that we have discovered the images of God that you don’t believe in, let’s begin to explore the God that you do believe in.’”[2]
John began to rebuild his image of God, and along with it his understanding of himself and his world. “I had to move on from childhood images of God the stern father, the strict teacher, the controlling judge, an object of fear. We anthropomorphise God but often choose from a very limited range of human characteristics.”[3] The childhood image of God as the enforcer of law, or even more benevolent notions, may still be bound by a letter driven imagery of the human imagination. The visual, the legal, the symbolic (as in Rom 1:18), or any particular representation, will fall short of the all-encompassing reality of the God in whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). There are a wide range of images, none of which can capture the deep mystery of an all-encompassing compassion, truth, and relational reality, inclusive of much of human reality, but as Paul describes we only come to this realization by the controlling factor of faith: “Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law” (Rom 3:27–28).
John describes a renewed recognition of God interacting within his life, and acknowledging this presence as an act of prayer. “Experiences of community and relationship, the joys of friendship, marriage and family, eating together, working together, playing together, making love together – these can all be prayer. In them God is present whether I recognise that presence or not, and an explicit awareness of that presence is prayer.”[4] John describes a growing recognition, of what in conversation he referred to as divinization, or the Eastern notion of the working of the Trinity in all of creation but also within the self. “This is a God whom I need to find within myself and to allow out in a ‘letting go’ rather than a ‘letting in’. We are not unconnected with the God who created us and the God who became incarnate, the God who is Alpha and Omega, the first-born of all creation (Colossians 1:15) and the endpoint towards whom we are all evolving. Thus relationship is also at the heart of Christianity.”[5] John discovers a means of interpreting all things according to Maximus the Confessor’s version of the rule of faith, “the rule of love,” drawing all things to God.
In Maximus understanding, all of God’s activity has the single purpose of uniting the world to himself. As Torstein Tollefesen explains, “Maximus asserts that the creation and ordering of the world is an embodiment of the Logos: ‘Always and in all God’s Logos . . . God wills to effect the mystery of His own embodiment.’”[6] The Word of God at work in us produces the same impetus behind and in Scripture. In Maximus’ famous quote, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[7] Or as he describes elsewhere, “This is the great and hidden mystery. This is the blessed end for which all things were brought into existence. This is the divine purpose conceived before the beginning of beings, and in defining it we would say that this mystery is the preconceived goal for the sake of which everything exists, but which itself exists on account of nothing, and it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[8] This is Maximus’ rule of faith, which precedes all things and is the purpose in all things, through which we rightly perceive all things. We are to put on the mind of Christ in our perception of ourselves and the world. There is a fusion of cosmology, soteriology, and psychology, in the activity of God’s unifying work. This rule of faith, for the early church, is not simply an interpretive method but it is the impetus behind the writing of the Gospels. The gospel truth precedes the truth of the Gospels, giving rise to their writing and this is what is to be encountered in the Scriptures.
The Rule of Faith as a Mode of Interpreting Scripture and All Things
As John Behr describes the rule of faith, this hypothesis of Scripture, enables “the demonstrations from Scripture to describe, accurately, the portrait of a king, Christ; it is a mode of interpretation delivered by the apostles in their proclamation of Christ.”[9] Scripture is an interpretation of the person of Christ (in both Testaments), and this is the substance of its unity and the point of departure, but Christ is the exegetical means of reading Scripture. Scripture is a confession of faith in the crucified and risen Christ, and this faith first arises in the Apostles and is being preached before it is written. The Church Father, Irenaeus, feels it is key that the apostles first preached the Gospel and subsequently wrote it down, as this indicates it is the continuous preaching in the Church of the tradition of the apostles. It is this word of the apostles that “has been handed down (‘traditioned’) in the Scriptures, as the ground and pillar of our faith.”[10] There is an encounter with a person in Scripture and this person, Christ, is not bound by the letters and writing, but is living. Scripture, tradition, and experience, arise from the authority of God in Christ and this becomes the means of an exegetical reason or explanation about God (Jn. 1:18).
Paul had spoken of the Church as the pillar and foundation of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), but the living Word, which is Christ, is also rightly described as the foundation: “For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:11). The Apostles possessed the fullness of the Word, and so Paul can also describe them as the foundation of the church: “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone“ (Ephesians 2:20). They first embody the Word constituting the continuing incarnation of Christ in the church, then they preach this word and subsequently write it down, but it is the living Christ that is to be encountered in this written word.
Irenaeus suggests that it is not writing per se that constitutes the gospel, as the illiterate “barbarians” who receive this gospel may have it written on their hearts though they cannot understand the words written with ink and paper. It is in fact meant to be an inscription on human character, in the human heart, and is only secondarily written in letters. Irenaeus is describing an encounter with the risen Christ, in the gospel, that is faith, the rule of interpretation. As he will describe, the rule of faith is inclusive of a specific understanding of God as creator, of Christ as unveiling and constituting the inspiration of scripture and delivering from death, and of the Holy Spirit who is being poured out making people righteous and forming a new unified people. One encounters God the Father, God the Son (as Word, Son of God, Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit in the gospel message, and this unity is the rule of faith. Rather than a dividing word of the law, this encounter brings about a transformed imagination, that is no longer shaped by what is obvious in this world (under heaven) but there is a “renewing of the mind” (Rom 12:2).
The rule of love or the rule of faith or the analogy of faith, or to say the same thing, the gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning provided in the Scriptures, but with this unveiling there is an unveiling, and unifying, of all things. As Paul explains to the Corinthians, “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3-4). These events are not obvious in the Hebrew Scriptures, but given these events in the life of Christ, this make sense of Scripture (the Hebrew Scriptures). By the same token they provide an interpretive lens for all things. Given the reality of Christ, the Scriptures provide a vocabulary, a world, a history, which can be read in this light, but so too the experience of the world. The canon or measure of Christ certainly is a means of interpreting Scripture but it is the means of apprehending all things. There is a conversion of the imagination, a depth perception no longer delimited by “things under heaven.”
The Rule of Faith as a Mindset
There is the interworking of the apostolic preaching, the rule of faith, and the role of Scripture, but according to the New Testament and the early church fathers, this rule of faith is at once to be a personal mindset and an ethical orientation organizing, not just Scripture, but one’s life. That is, this rule is more than a proposition or rule in the ordinary sense, but is the means of seeing and measuring all things by the peace and love of Christ. The rule is linked with unity and peace, it is linked with apprehending rightly, and it is linked to making critical judgments, and all of these are linked with putting on the mind of Christ. Which is to say this rule of faith is taken up, cathected (to redeploy Freud’s word) into the self as part of one’s character and one’s apprehension of the world.
Paul explains that the “analogy of faith” works in conjunction with preaching and teaching and he wanted every prophecy and every teaching to be conformed to the analogy or likeness of faith (Rom. 12:6). The application or extrapolation of the kerygma may be the specialty of the prophet, but Paul calls every Christian to “appraise all things” according to the mind of Christ. Putting on the mind of Christ means that the individual is enabled to make authoritative judgments, informed critiques, “so that we may know things freely given to us by God,” so that we combine “spiritual thoughts with spiritual words” and thus come to understand those things that “are spiritually appraised” (I Cor. 2:12-16). This spiritual individual has the wisdom provided by God, where the natural man, or literally “a man of animal soul,” is incapable of discerning things according to the Spirit. Jesus promised that the Spirit would guide into all truth (Jn. 16:13) and Paul seems to be applying this to the individuals in the Corinthian church.
In dealing with those who are challenging his teaching and authority in Corinth, Paul explains that they are using the wrong measurement: “they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves,” thus “they are without understanding” (II Cor. 10:12). Where they measure by human, self-established measure (measuring themselves by themselves), Paul “measures by the measure which God has given me.” As he explains to the Ephesians this is “the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). This is the measure that, rather than stirring up human antagonism, is the means by which “we all attain to the unity of the faith.” Here is Maximus rule of love, drawing all things into the unity of Christ. Our usual measure, in which we measure ourselves against others, stirs up jealousy and violence. The force that killed Christ, namely the measure of man, is countered by Christ and the rule of faith. That is, the peace of Christ embodied in nonviolent love and nonviolent resistance, is the counter to the human rule and is the goal and means of the rule of faith, a deep transformative grammar preceding what is “clearly seen” (Rom 1:20).
From the Rule of Law to the Rule of Faith
There is a double meaning to this rule or canon, in that it is not simply a measure but is to “rule” or to be predominant in thought. It is an alternative to the rule of the law, both as measure and means, in that the law divides and diminishes but this rule speaks of a corporate identity in the Holy Spirit (no longer focused on “I” or law as in Romans 7), which has cosmic implications for those in Christ: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” (8:19), as they will reveal what is not now “clearly seen” or seemingly obvious. God understood in a relational identity, rather than a legal identity, is “Abba, Father.” The work of the “I” as measure and end, is displaced by the “rule” of the Spirit of life (8:2) which results in freedom from slavery to fear and a reconstituting the Subject as a child of God. The Pauline “body of sin” (6:6) or “body of death” (7:24) is displaced in the resurrection life of the Spirit (8:10-11) which is the beginning of cosmic redemption – “the redemption of our bodies” (8:23) and the redemption of the cosmos (8:21). This is not a condemning measure but redemptive. The measure and means that is predominant, is self-measure, how I measure up to others, or even within myself, or what is obvious to all, as if declared from what has been made (Rom 1:18ff). This natural measure belongs to the natural man, whose mind is captured by condemnation, but “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:1).
The unification and participation Paul is describing is the realization of the rule of love. The law of life frees from the rule of law and letter: “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom 8:2). There is a deep psychological shift in passing from measure of the law to the measure of faith, in and through which all things are reconceived. The law aroused an unquenchable desire, that is the desire for unity invoked or propelled by alienation. The fear and slavery under the law of sin and death, with its work through deceptive desire aroused by the law, became “another law” (Rom 7:23, ἕteronnόmon), but this law is now voided along with all of its various machinations. Law as measure and means seems to be part of the process of maturing, or being “tutored” (Galatians 3:24), but we pass from the tutor to a more fulsome reality that no longer requires this guide. The Spirit gives the righteousness of God or the promise of life indicated in the law, and the law’s “righteous decree” of life has been fulfilled. This then results in the capacity to “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (8:4). This walk is characterized in all of its phases by the power of life which enables the mindset and hope of the Subject in Christ.
The Rule of Faith and the Problem of Suffering
In our discussion with John Ashworth, he described a new way of viewing his own suffering and trauma. He had arrived at a moment of unbelief, or a denial of the God in whom he formerly believed, due to the violence he had witnessed and to which he had been subjected. It reminded me of the sort of protest atheism of Ted Turner, who had started as deeply religious, but with the prolonged illness and tragic death of his younger sister, Mary Jane, Turner turned to something of a protest atheism, as he was very angry at the God in which he did not believe. It is a story that could probably be repeated many times over, as in the case of Charles Darwin, whose oldest daughter, Annie, fell ill, or Samuel Clemens or Albert Einstein, all of whom came to unbelief due to suffering. The typical apologetic might attempt to explain, to make the suffering somehow beneficial, but there is really no answer of this sort, though suffering is thematic in Scripture.
John Ashworth describes an ability to see suffering in a different light: “Despite the hardships I regard it as a privilege to have shared the suffering, experienced the solidarity and camaraderie, and to have been part of something worthwhile. That’s what keeps me going and sustains me during difficult times, along with the knowledge that it’s not me who bears the responsibility of bringing peace and justice to Sudan and South Sudan.”[11] Or as he says elsewhere, “God is with us, not in an abstract and spiritual way, but in a very real and concrete way. God has experienced the sufferings of God’s people.”[12] He describes the work in analysis as realization that it may be in peak moments, “with a beautiful view, with joy or sorrow, with pain and suffering, with love and human relationships, with birth or death or other rites of passage” that we know God’s presence.[13] His book is a long meditation on suffering, and coming to recognize God in the suffering.
Where in Romans 7 Paul describes an unbearable suffering, in Romans 8, he provides the metaphor of childbirth, in which to couch and reframe human suffering. “For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (Rom 8:22). Paul’s description of hope (the unseen, over and against that which is seen and obvious in Rom 1:18ff) allows for a full engagement with the vicissitudes of suffering as this suffering and even death is no longer definitive or determinative of life in light of the hope of certain glory. The “present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (8:18) as neither “death nor life” can separate from the love of God (8:38-39). Hope and faith embrace the dynamics of change, as it is focused on certain future fulfilment of a promise which cannot be obtained” within the framework (“under the heavens” (Rom 1:18, the possibilities inherent in the present). Faith and hope bear an unfinished (unseen, and beyond the heavens) embrace of the future, the possibility of growth and change. This hope directly counters the futility of sin (futility or matiotēs connotes what pseudos “lie” meant in Genesis and in Romans 1:25, “they exchanged the truth for a lie”). There is not an abolition of the present world so that heaven might take its place but a transformation on the order of birth, in which the pangs of suffering are fulfilling a purpose. With the “adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (8:23), the purpose of creation’s suffering will have appeared and the longing of hope and faith fulfilled.
Paul’s resolution to the alienation of the law is to become a child of God, the realization of faith. Where the sinful mind is by definition “hostile to God” the one adopted as a child by the Spirit has overcome this hostility enacted against the measure of the law (8:7). As in Ezekiel’s prophecy, the heart of stone will be replaced with a heart of flesh and God’s Spirit will indwell his people and enable them to keep the law (Ezek. 36:26-27). The move from law as alienating and oppressive to the law written on the heart (Jer. 31.33) is a description of the rule of faith, a character shaping way of apprehending. Paul’s cry at the end of Romans 7, “Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (7.24), is followed by a cry of joy, “And by him we cry, “Abba, Father” (8:15). The measure and means have changed. The God who is law giver in ch. 7 is Abba in ch. 8 and this difference is wrought through “The Spirit himself who testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children” (8:15). This inward testimony is the measure of faith in the transformed mind.
(Sign up for the course, Sin and Salvation, touching upon the apocalyptic new hermeneutic involved in a nonviolent reading of God and atonement. The course will run from the third week of October to the second week of December. Sign up here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/ and then go to current course offerings.)
[1] Thanks to Brian Sartor for inspiring many of these thoughts. Listen to our podcast here, http://podcast.forgingploughshares.org/e/brian-sartor-describes-pauls-deconstruction-of-the-teaching-of-the-false-teacher/
[2] John Ashworth, Journeying Toward Nonviolence: My Life in Sudan (London: Redhaven Books, 2026), 87.
[3] Ashworth, 88.
[4] Ashworth, 90.
[5] Ashworth, 91.
[6] Torstein Tollefesen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2.
[7] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1 Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7, paragraph 22.
[8] St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions to Thalassius, question 60, paragraph 3
[9] John Behr, The Way to Nicaea (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 37,
[10] Behr, 39.
[11] Ashworth, 15-16.
[12] Ashworth, 61.
[13] Ashworth, 89.
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