Tag: J. Louis Martyn

The Rule of Faith is the Gospel of Peace  

The “rule of faith” is a short summary of the Gospel (the work of Christ in redemption, creation, and the work of the Trinity), often deployed over and against Judaizers or heretics, to reconfirm the unity of Scripture, or the unity of the faith community.[1] The rule is that handed down by the Apostles and agreed upon by all the churches, and is thus an assertion of authority, completeness, and is unifying. It is a unifying or peacemaking rule or the application of the Gospel of peace, where there is a threat to unity. The Scriptures do not contain this unity apart from the  Gospel, summed up in the rule of faith, but given the fact of the Gospel there is unity to be found within the Hebrew Scriptures, or between the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, or within creation, and in this sense, it is directly tied to peace. The rule of faith sums up the Gospel of peace, as a unifying whole (it is pictured in cosmic terms) doing the work of the Gospel, breaking down what would otherwise be a dividing wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile, the Old and New Testament, or conceptions of God, or what Paul calls the “elemental principles” or the “principalities and powers.” Though nonviolence or peace may not be immediately associated with the rule of faith, in the context in which it is used in the New Testament, it is specifically this rule which is deployed to overcome the dividing or violent principles of this world order.

The rule functions in the first instance in regard to creation, and will be deployed by Irenaeus and the Church Fathers against the Gnostics, who would denigrate material creation, and picture salvation as a departure from the material world. This departure is not Gospel peace, as it is dependent upon an antagonistic dualism of the flesh, or what Paul will call the “elementary principles” and it equates salvation with shedding the physical body. The widespread notion in the ancient world, which Paul is clearly opposing (in Gal 3:28 and 6:15), is that the origins or the fundamental building blocks of the universe are based on opposed pairs (earth/air, water/fire) and God is read into this antagonism against the material world. The problem with the law, the problem with the flesh, and the problem with “this present evil age” reduce to the singular problem. The “elements of the cosmos” (στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου) have been made absolute and have not been understood in relationship to God but as opposed to God. The incarnation, the central part of the rule of faith directly contradicts this anti-materialism and is also the direct convergence with peace, as it is on the cross (the culmination of incarnation) that peace is established (Col. 1:20).

The rule of faith disrupts the dualism between heaven and earth and God and creation, by recognizing Jesus Christ as the creator incarnate. It is through the materiality of his blood, the physicality of his crucifixion, the embodied nature of his resurrection (all central to the Gospel or the rule of faith) that he makes peace. The material order, the embodied or incarnate, are affirmed in Christ, but the sting of sin and death are removed. In Paul’s summation of the rule, the incarnation, death, and resurrection are key: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that 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, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve” (1 Cor 15:3–5). Death due to sin, burial, and then the defeat of sin and death in the resurrection of Christ, are the crux of faith. There is a defeat of the violence that would obliterate Christ, and this summation of the rule is the defeat of the rule of death: “For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death” (1 Cor 15:25–26). The violence that killed him is undone in the defeat of death in his resurrection. He is peace, the “abolishing of enmity,” the uniter of a divided humanity, split by the elementary principles contained in ordinances (Eph 2:14–16).   

Paul provides the example in Galatians, couching the rule of faith in a reconceived cosmic order, or a new creation. He is refuting Judaizers who are boasting in their law-keeping, while he would only boast “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” for through the cross “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation. And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God” (Gal 6:14-18). This rule of the cross is apocalyptic, as it deconstructs the cosmos ordered by law (circumcision or uncircumcision) and is the basis of a peaceful “new creation.” It is not simply that Christ’s crucifixion has caused Paul to think less of circumcision and law, than he had previously. According to Louis Martyn, “On the contrary, the cross separated Paul totally from the whole of the religious cosmos, of which a fundamental element was the pair of opposites called circumcision and uncircumcision, the Law/the Not Law.”[2] There is a new rule, a new ordering principle, at the foundation of the world. The former world was founded on violent division; the new creation is unified in Christ.

Paul makes a similar case in Colossians: “When He had disarmed the rulers and authorities, He made a public display of them, having triumphed over them through Him. Therefore no one is to act as your judge in regard to food or drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath day— things which are a mere shadow of what is to come; but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col 2:16–17). The “basic principles” which formerly enslaved and which now threaten again, are precisely those commanded in the law (I Ch. 23:31). The Colossians, like the Ephesians and Galatians, are being lured back into a Judaized Christianity, in which the law is pictured as a necessary first order arrangement (much as in contractual theology). Paul argues that, the specific way in which the reign of death is exercised is through human subjection to laws, principles and powers, which have no substance. They are lacking in truth and reality and yet these shadowy powers once reigned where Christ now reigns (“the substance belongs to Christ”).

The false teachers want to make the gospel a covenantal nomism, in which Christ has met the requirements of the law, so now righteousness has been obtained on the basis of keeping covenant through the law. Paul’s gospel opposes this partial gospel with the pronouncement that the malevolent grasp of the old-world order is finished. Christ has liberated from slavery through his cross. The lie is displaced by the truth as by the cross the cosmos has been crucified to me and I have been crucified to the cosmos (Gal 2:19; 5:24; 6:14). Circumcision is nothing, Jewishness is nothing, Gentileness is nothing, gender is nothing, ethnicity is nothing, philosophy is nothing, as what is taking place is on the order of creation from nothing, but the nothing is exposed in light of the new creation: “For neither is circumcision anything nor is uncircumcision anything.” What is something is the new creation. The old cosmos, with its violent ordering principle has not been repaired, but it has been displaced. The cross has rendered one world dead and buried (the world controlled by death and violence) as the new world of peace is now commenced.

The world, under the rule of the law or the elementary principles is violent and the god attached to it is violent, and this god and world are put to death at the cross. “The antinomies that lay at the foundation of the cosmos have now disappeared.”[3] The cosmos founded on opposed pairs (which for Paul was universal), no longer exists: “For when all of you were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ as though he were your clothing. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is no male and female; for all of you are One in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:27–28). Those in Christ, in rightly recognizing the rule have passed from the old ordering principle (the elementary principles, the binary divisions), in which the Galatians would bite and devour one another, and they need to “take care that [they] are not consumed by one another” (Gal 5:15). There is a violent incapacity and antagonism in the law of the flesh: “For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit . . . so that you may not do the things that you please” (Gal 5:17). The deeds of the flesh are inherently punishing: “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal 5:19-21). In this sense the rule of faith is no rule or law at all: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Ga 5:22–23).

The rule of faith directly coincides with the Gospel of peace, or the nonviolence of God as realized in the cross. Christ does not coercively throw off the elementary principles or the principalities and powers, but undermines them in accepting the death and violence they met out and defeats them at the cross. This message of a new peaceful cosmic order instituted at the cross, is the Gospel or rule of faith. To believe, preach, or practice, anything less than this rule is to fall short of the measure of the Gospel of peace.

[1] Here is Irenaeus summation of the rule of faith: “The church, dispersed throughout the world to the ends of the earth, received from the apostles and their disciples the faith in one God the Father Almighty, “who made heaven and earth and sea and all that is in them” (Exod. 20:11), and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, incarnate for our salvation, and in the Holy Spirit, who through the prophets predicted the dispensations of God: the coming, the birth from the Virgin, the passion, the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension of the beloved Jesus Christ our Lord in the flesh into the heavens, and his coming from the heavens in the glory of the Father to “recapitulate all things” (Eph. 1:10) and raise up all flesh of the human race, so that to Christ Jesus our Lord and God and Savior and King, according to the good pleasure of the invisible Father, “every knee should bow, of beings in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess him” (Phil. 2:10–11), and that he should render a just judgement on all and send to eternal fire the spiritual powers of iniquity, the lying and apostate angels, and men who are impious, unjust, iniquitous, and blasphemous, while on the contrary he should give life imperishable as a reward to the just and equitable who keep his commandments and persevere in his love (some from the beginning, others since their conversion), and surround it with eternal glory.” Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons, (New York: Routledge, 2009), 53-54.

[2] J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 565.

[3] Martyn, 570.

Beyond the “Now and Not Yet” of Salvation History and Apocalyptic Theology

The image of transition between two ages, two kingdoms, or even two bodies (mortal and immortal), captured in the phrase “now and not yet,” conveys a partial truth about the dynamic of the Christian life, but does not capture the New Testament focus on the fullness of victory in Christ. The phrase conveys the overlap and tension between two ages but limits Christ’s victory, picturing the Christian life more in terms of (a Romans 7) struggle rather than a (Romans 8) triumph. This is clearly the case in a salvation history approach, but is also true in an apocalyptic approach (though, I will suggest is not decisive). Ann Jervis argues that Paul does not refer to two overlapping ages (the old and the new), but to the present evil age (what she calls “death-time”) as opposed to “life-time” in Christ.[1]

She argues, those in Christ are not constrained by the old age (defined by death), but having been crucified and raised with Christ there is nothing partial, incomplete, or split, about it, so inasmuch as “now and not yet,” grounds salvation history and apocalyptic theology, this demonstrates their inadequacy. Christ’s victory over sin and death, the defeat of the devil, the exposure of the deception of sin, adoption into the family of God, resurrection life now, entry into the life of Christ, and an alternative experience (all of which are primary themes of Paul and the New Testament) are not pending, overlapping with something else, or partial and “not yet.” To characterize them as such is to mischaracterize salvation. The power of darkness and death or the power of futility or a lie are defeated by the light and truth unleashed in the person of Christ. Here there is no overlap, sequence, or interdependence of two ages, and the degree to which theology has focused on two ages, two kingdoms, or two orders of power in conflict, it misses that Paul is not describing two orders of time and reality, but two relationships: a relationship with law or a relationship with God. You can be a slave to the law and what is the same thing, to the fundamental principles of the world, or you can be a son or daughter of God (Gal. 4:6-7).

Salvation History Overlooks the Adequacy of Christ

In a salvation history perspective the focus is on the outworking of history through two ages. There is a flat dependence on history and time, and a failure to account for the completeness of Christ’s work, as completion must await the outworking of history and the return of Christ. History is continually moving toward a goal which it has not yet reached.[2] N.T. Wright, a salvation historical theologian (though he also wants to embrace an apocalyptic understanding) illustrates this overdependence on the unfolding of Israel’s history, such that he seems to bypass the need for God to break through the world so as to give his own Person as the subject of knowledge. Jesus claims he is the way, the truth, and the light, yet Wright has collapsed divine self-disclosure into history, identifying that disclosure too simply with the objective consideration of the historical events behind the texts of Scripture. God is known by our “critically realist” knowledge of his historical activity, given to us by the accounts of Scripture, behind which it lies. Scripture records and bears witness to these events, but the question is if the appearance of Christ is dependent on this history (see my blog here).[3]

Paul, in Galatians for example, is not interested in the history of Israel for its own sake, and is not trying to show how Israel’s salvation history would benefit either Jews or Gentiles. Paul may think Israel was in a different situation than the pagans in that he distinguishes between the child and the slave but this is in no way a description of some sort of intermediate state, as is revealed in his focus on explaining the similarities. All suffered a form of oppression and all in Christ have received adoption as children. So, the salvation historical focus on a historical “now and not yet” sells the work of Christ short in depicting it as incomplete. The question is if apocalyptic theology is equally guilty?

Salvation is Complete in Christ and Not an Age

Paul is not depicting two overlapping ages and does not speak of a new age, though apocalyptic theologians suppose this is implied in his use of new creation, kingdom of God, and eternal life.[4] As Jervis notes, contrary to the apocalyptic reading, “Paul regarded not the new age but life in and with Christ as God’s goal for humanity. Paul connects certain concepts with that life . . . but makes clear that new creation, kingdom, and eternal life are the consequences and conditions of life with Christ.”[5] Paul’s primary focus is on Christ, and there is no overlap of ages or new creation with the evil age. In Galatians 6:14-15 for example, the old world in no more for Christians. They are not living in two worlds or two ages, but are living in Christ: “in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). “Not only is Christ’s crucifixion the foundation of new creation, but Paul strongly emphasizes union with Christ—not new creation—as the result of Christ’s crucifixion.”[6] Being in Christ is new creation: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come” (2 Cor. 5:17). This is not a contrast of ages, but of being “in Christ” or living for the self and the flesh. “To be clear, new creation signals more than an anthropological concept—a new humanity that exists in the present evil age. It is a new humanity that exists in Christ.”[7]

So too, “kingdom” is not an entity existing apart from Christ or subject to other kings. It is his rule, his defeat of sin and death that marks his kingdom. “For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom. 14:9). His is not a kingdom separate from who he is, and the resurrection power he exercises is marked by all who are made alive in Christ (I Cor. 15:22). That is, the kingdom is constituted by those belonging to Christ (Gal. 5:16). As Jervis concludes, Paul’s references to “new creation” and “kingdom of God” focus not on new age concepts but on Christ. Paul did not organize his understanding of Christ’s death, resurrection, and exaltation within a two-age framework or a conception of the overlapping of the ages for believers.[8] Believers are entirely united with Christ, as a couple is united in marriage (I Cor. 6:17), and this union in Christ is the liberating reality freeing from the present “evil age” (Gal. 1:4).

Paul’s point (throughout Romans and elsewhere) is for Christians to recognize that death or the old age no longer pertains to their reality: “How shall we who died to sin still live in it?” (Rom. 6:2). They may struggle with sin, but only because they have failed to fully realize the reality of being in Christ. Christ has defeated death (Rom. 6:8-10) and the Christian is to live the reality of this victory: “consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:11). This eternal (αἰώνιος) life is not a form of life which participates in mere finitude, though the Christian may occasionally fall back into the delusion of life controlled by death. If there is overlapping and partiality, it is not because the Christian has to defeat an enemy not yet conquered, but because they are not “presenting the members of their body dead to sin” (Rom. 6:13). The deception of sin is not partially removed, in some sort of half-truth and the sting of death does not survive in half-life half-death. Christians are made alive in Christ and the truth of Christ has completely dispelled the lie. “The fact must be acknowledged that the apostle speaks not about the old age and the new but rather about the present evil age and Christ.”[9]

Then What is the Status of Apocalyptic Theology

Apocalyptic theology might be served by Jervis’ critique (though she does not pose this possibility) by recognizing that the problem of sin and deliverance do not pertain to impersonal “ages,” or “kingdoms,” but to a personal enslaving deception and liberating truth. Early apocalyptic theology so identified human enslavement with the demonic that it missed human subjectivity. As the question was put to Ernst Käsemann (among the original modern apocalyptic theologians), “If God’s intervention on the human stage, exorcising the world of its demons, is 100% of the equation, where is human subjectivity in any recognisable form?”[10] Louis Martyn, as Beverly Gaventa points out, has practically removed the role of human initiative or any notion of personal faith.[11] “Martyn’s avoidance of conversion language and earlier individualistic readings of Galatians has taken us too far here, so that even the function of Paul’s self-reference in the letter’s argument (or re-proclamation) does not become clear.”[12] The focus on the demonic or the powers has tended to miss the explanatory power of the personal plight (deception) and Personal resolution (truth) in Christ. According to Bruce McCormack, readers “are left with a rich battery of images and concepts but images and concepts alone, no matter how rhetorically powerful, do not rise to the level of adequate explanation. How is it that the ‘rectification’ of the world is achieved by Christ’s faithful death?”[13]

Jervis is not concerned to rescue apocalyptic theology, though she deploys her own apocalyptic-like categories (with life-time displacing death-time). Her death-time points to the deep personal deception surrounding death: “God permits God’s foes a limited range of influence, allowing humanity to choose to exist in the illusory dead-end temporality grounded in defeat (what I term “death-time”); which is in reality non-time.”[14] “Paul thinks that believers have experienced two types of time: one ruled by death, from which they have been liberated, and one of life, from which death has been expelled . . .”[15] In her explanation, Paul describes Christ’s defeat of death and sin as simultaneous, as death has enslaved to fear, and Christ liberates from this enslavement. Though Jervis does not deploy “apocalypse” as part of her position, nonetheless her depiction of death’s deception and how Christ makes a world of difference, potentially supports an apocalyptic perspective.

Paul’s depiction of deception in regard to death poses the possibility of cosmic and personal enslavement, which explains how Christ’s defeat of this lie is of cosmic proportions (appropriately described as apocalyptic). Explanation of death’s deception provides explanation that focus on the demonic, the powers, the ages, the kingdom or even anthropology has not provided (see my book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation).

[1] L. Ann Jervis, Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023)

[2] Jervis,17.

[3]  Grant Macaskill, History, Providence and the Apocalyptic Paul” – https://aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/2164/7574/History_2c_Providence_and_Apocalyptic_Paul_SJT.pdf;jsessionid=FA0FD8F9F020B597D401884CE00C1150?sequen

Douglas Campbell spells this out quite brilliantly in Deliverance, but is available in his review of Wrights Volumes on Paul and The Faithfulness of God – https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/douglas-campbell/

[4] Jervis, 48.

[5] Jervis, 49-50.

[6] Jervis, 51.

[7] Jervis, 52.

[8] Jervis, 55-56.

[9] Jervis, 60.

[10] “A Tribute To Ernst Käsemann and a Theological Testament,” 391. Cited in David Anthony Bennet Shaw, The ‘Apocalyptic’ Paul: An Analysis & Critique with Reference to Romans 1-8, (Fitzwilliam College, 2019, unpublished dissertation) 145.

[11] Shaw, 143

[12] Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Review of Galatians by J. Louis Martyn,” RBL, 2001. Cited in Shaw, 145.

[13] Bruce L. McCormack, “Can We Still Speak of ‘Justification by Faith’? An In-House Debate with Apocalyptic Readings of Paul,” in Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter, ed. Mark W. Elliott et al. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 167. Shaw, 160.

[14] Jervis, xiv.

[15] Jervis, 73.

An Alternative Understanding of Sin and Salvation

The understanding of salvation that I and maybe the majority were reared on, or the typical Protestant understanding (as in justification theory) is that all people recognize God and his righteousness, and experience the incapacity to keep the law. This inability to keep the law is definitive of both the human problem and the solution of the cross of Christ. We come to Christ, having realized we cannot keep the law and that only Jesus can fulfill the laws righteous demands and pay the penalty for transgression. Much of this understanding is drawn from just a few texts, mainly in Romans (and primarily in the first 4 chapters of Romans). I want to pose a different picture of the human problem and a different soteriology, based on an alternative reading of Romans.

As I have argued (here and here), this common Protestant understanding is a result of fusing the words of the false Teacher, as found in 1:18-32 and scattered through the first three chapters, with the teaching of Paul. The human predicament, judging from the rest of Romans, turns out to be much worse than described in Romans 1:18-32. In this description, people know God and know what they should do (keep the law) but do not do it (implying in the description a means of escape through the law), but in the rest of Romans Paul describes people who are in bondage (8:15-6), who have been deceived and enslaved by a lie (7:7-15), who are hostile to God (8:7) and this hostility is the best they can do. Death reigns (5:14), both in the literal sense and in that life is ordered by this reality (5:12). People attempt to engineer reality, through the law (1:18-2:21), through the flesh (7:5, 25), through the elemental principles of the cosmos (Gal. 4:3, in a parallel passage), such that they can negotiate death but all of their various means of escape are deadly.

Far from the law offering a potential means of escape, either through law-keeping or through Christ’s law-keeping, the law is deadly in the same way that flesh is deadly. Though people imagine they can defeat death (through law or religion) in what is called “the covenant with death,” death reneges on the supposed arrangement (9:32 referencing Isaiah 28). The human arrangement with death, which Paul sums up as the sin condition (the law of sin and death, 8:2), deals only in death – there is no life in the arrangement.

Though 1:18-32 pictures a universal capacity to recognize God and the law from nature, it turns out (at least according to the rest of Romans), Paul is not optimistic about people perceiving the problem let alone coming up with a solution. Far from some sort of deep anthropological insight on the part of humanity, Paul pictures a deluded humanity. A deadly exchange has taken hold universally, corporately (chapter 5) and individually in the human psyche (chapter 7) and Paul spends most of the first 4 chapters of Romans explaining how the perceived solution, the law, is bound up with the problem. The deception in regard to the law, through which death takes hold as the perceived means of escape, is obscuring the singular solution: the gospel. That is, God has provided a resolution to the human predicament, but because the problem has been misunderstood (due, in part, to false teaching) the solution is now misunderstood and obscured.  Thus, Paul is writing this letter.

Paul explains the problem, in light of the solution (7:7-25), as the problem cannot otherwise be grasped. As Douglas Campbell explains, chapter 7 is not simply a psychological portrayal of pre-Christian experience. “Essentially, it supplies a theological analysis of non-Christian ontology, whether that is present in the non-Christian (as seems obvious to the Christian) or in the Christian (as seems at least partly to be the case on this side of the end of the age). Hence, it is fundamentally retrospective—the result of a vantage point available only in Christ, which supplies the key theological categories and insights for constructing it.”[1]

Chapter 7:7-25, referencing Adam, is more complicated than mere legalism. Judaism per se is not the problem, though the law of Moses creates the same sort of problem. The reality of the human predicament may be perceived to revolve around the law, but this perception itself, in Paul’s description, misses how it is that sin has deceived in regard to law. In other words, Christianity as we have it in much of Protestantism (justification theory) is implicated in the problem inasmuch as the problem and solution are thought to be defined by the law.

In Genesis 3, it is not that the command per se is problematic, but due to the lie of sin (as Paul describes the work of the serpent) the presumption is that the command is the means of access to life. “The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.  For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment deceived me and through it killed me” (Romans 7:10-11). Paul is not describing a slowly dawning awareness in the struggle to keep the law, and then the recognized inability to do so. He is describing the deception as it occurred in Genesis and which continues to reign. This is not someone who has deep cognitive awareness of their sin problem. This person is deceived, controlled by the flesh, and serving the desire of the flesh (7:5, 7, 8, 14). This individual is controlled by death, with chapter 7 providing a detailed account of 5:12-21, of how it is that death came to reign and continues to reign in the human race.

It is not a matter that no one can keep the law, and this is why they are not justified, though this is how verses such as Galatians 3:10 are often read. As Daniel Boyarin notes, a better understanding is not to imagine there is a problem with the doing of the law. Most Jews, like the Pharisee Paul, assumed they kept the law perfectly. The problem is not that it cannot be done, the problem is imagining that the doing is the main thing. “We could rewrite the verse, then, as: ‘Everyone, who [precisely] by doing it does not uphold all that is written in the book of the Law, is under a curse’; i.e., by doing it, by physical performance, works of the Law, one is not upholding all that which is written in the book of the Law, and that is the curse, because ‘all that is written’ implies much more than mere doing!”[2] As Paul, argues in chapter 4, it is faith that precedes the doing of the law. Or as he states it in 3:27, “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.” But as he argues (in chapter 4), this is an idea that can be extrapolated from the law. The law points beyond itself to the faith of Christ. As Boyarin maintains, “It follows from this that those who live by faith are the righteous, i.e., the justified. He then argues that those who live by the Law do not live by faith, since the verse in Leviticus explicitly reads ‘He who does them lives by them,’ i.e., one who does the commandments lives by them and not by faith. Since, then, we know from Habakkuk that the righteous live by faith, he who lives by them and not by faith (and, thereby, does not fulfill the Law) is not righteous—is not justified.”[3]

Boyarin maintains Paul is arguing in a manner familiar to the Rabbis and Pharisees: “Paul is using methods of interpretation that would not surprise any Pharisee (I suspect) or Rabbi, although the results he arrives at would, of course, shock them to their depths.”[4] The law is a curse if the doing of it, or the having it, is thought to be adequate. According to Campbell, “The curse’s basis is actually life in Christ—a life of freedom, adulthood, inheritance, and the Spirit. In comparison with this life, Judaism under the law is confined, immature, harsh, and oppressed, and hence also cursed; it is the life from which Christians have been ‘purchased.’”[5]

The law does not produce faith nor resurrection, though it is based on faith (resurrection faith, 4:23). “In short, by acknowledging the crucified and resurrected Christ, and relying on him for deliverance—a deliverance that is already in some sense inaugurated (so vv. 17–20)—Paul observes that Jewish Christians have automatically displaced law observance from a critical saving and transformational role.”[6] There is no room for “works of law” even in the anteroom to faith. One does not progress through works of the law, to despair about keeping the law, to faith. Galatians, like Romans, describes a setting aside of law: “knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified” (Gal. 2:15). “Because transformation comes through the Christ event, works of law have been negated (at least in relation to transformation), along with any subsequent construction of their importance.”[7]

As Louis Martyn argues in regard to Galatians, the false teachers (who seem to be the very one or ones in Rome) are arguing Christians need the law, in particular circumcision, so as to curb the desires of the flesh. But Paul equates this reliance on the law as equivalent to reliance on the flesh. “Abraham, in their estimate, would have defeated the desire of the flesh by keeping the law, beginning with circumcision. So, Paul’s juxtaposition of flesh against Spirit, specifically refers to the foreskin of the penis. Their reliance on the law is literally reliance on this piece of flesh.”[8]

This reliance, as depicted in Galatians, is the equivalent of being a slave to the elementary principles of the cosmos. The widespread notion in the ancient world, which Paul is clearly opposing (in Gal. 3:28 and 6:15), is that the origins or the fundamental building blocks of the universe are based on opposed pairs (earth/air, water/fire). The problem with the law, the problem with the flesh, and the problem with “this present evil age” reduce to the singular problem that the “elements of the cosmos” (στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου) have been made absolute (a divine dialectic) and have not been understood in relationship to God. Whatever Paul might mean by these elements, it seems that the law and the flesh are counted among those things which held all people captive (Gal. 4:3).

The same dynamic is at work in Romans 7. It is not a matter of the law of the mind gaining control of the law of the flesh, as both are part of the dynamic (dialectic) of the law of sin and death . It is not the body over and against the spirit that is the problem, but this dialectic, as in Paul’s pitting of his mind against the body is definitive of the predicament. He sees two laws at work: “I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members” (Rom. 7.23). The point is not that one of these laws is right and the other is wrong; the point is there is a war being waged in which the individual is the victim, and only Christ can end this struggle.

As Martyn notes, the antinomies that served as the building blocks of the universe have disappeared.[9] The cosmos founded on opposed pairs no longer exists. “For when all of you were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ as though he were your clothing. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is no male and female; for all of you are One in Christ Jesus” (3:27–28). Those in Christ have suffered the loss of the cosmos for the unity (the new cosmic order) found in Christ. The cosmic order, in which law versus no law, circumcision versus uncircumcision, or flesh versus spirit is broken open by Christ: “But may it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the cosmos has been crucified to me, and I to the cosmos. For neither is circumcision anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” (Gal. 6:14-15).

As Paul explains in chapter 8, there is an incapacity – but it is not an incapacity of the will or of someone attempting to keep the law and finding they are not able. Rather, there is an incapacity to recognize God, due to an innate hostility in the fleshly mind: “it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so” for “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (8:8). This hostility arises in conjunction with the flesh and the law. It is not a matter of separating the law from the flesh, but it is a matter of doing away with the law as the basis of understanding the problem (sin) and the solution (salvation).

In chapter 5 of Romans, when Paul turns from the problem of the false Teacher and the law, he provides a picture of the problem and solution (from chapters 5-8) revolving around death and life: “For if by the transgression of the one, death reigned through the one, much more those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ” (5:17). This pictures “life” in the future age, but it also references a different sort of life now. People are baptized so that they “might walk in newness of life” (6:4).  In this new life the oppressive measure of the law has been set aside in being joined to Christ (7:1-3). Rather than the law serving to define salvation, with its being set aside the reign of death has ended (5:21). Salvation is rescue from death and the reign or rule of death through sin (5:18). This simple observation comes with a host of implications in regard to God, the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and the nature of reality and experience.

In contrast with justification theory, the primary human problem is not God’s anger due to transgression of the law, but captivity, deception, and hostility arising through sin and death. Both chapter 5 and chapter 8 mention an inherent hostility to God. The sons and daughters of Adam are fundamentally God’s enemies (5:10; 8:5–8) as “the sinful mind is hostile to God” (8:7). Romans 7 describes the inner workings of this hostility, which does indeed include the law, but not as a point of recognition and enlightenment but as the place where deception, desire, and death enter in. In 7.7ff the law, which gives rise to forbidden desire, in spite of the life that it seemed to offer and due to the deception of sin, produces death for the ἐγὼ or a life of death described as an agonistic struggle in which the self is split against itself and sin is in control.  Paul sums this up as the “body of death” (7.24) or “the law of sin and death” (8.2).  The law of sin and death is the structuring principle of the Subject in which life is controlled by an orientation to death (a primordial deception and a destructive drive).

While the problem is more tragic and all-encompassing than pictured in justification theory, the good news is that the solution is more all-encompassing (universal) and unconditional. “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life” (5:10). Here there is no angry deity punishing legal transgression by taking out his wrath on Christ. This salvation speaks of a loving God transforming the cosmos and the very make-up of the human psyche and subject. This salvation is transformational, a passage from death into life, a passage from flesh – law – elementary principles into new life through the Son and the Spirit. The old order of bondage, enslavement to law and flesh has been defeated and the new age is inaugurated. This is an apocalyptic intervention into a bondage in which a right understanding of God and the human situation are impossible. Deliverance, rescue, resurrection and new creation are inaugurated by God through Christ, and this alone allows for salvation and a consequent right understanding (Rom. 8:20–23).

[1] Campbell, Douglas A.. The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul (pp. 141-142). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

[2] Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkely: University of California Press, 1994) https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft7w10086w&chunk.id=ch6&toc.id=&brand=ucpress

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Campbell, 425.

[6] Campbell, 844.

[7] Campbell, 846.

[8] J. Louis Martyn, Galatians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Yale University Press, 1997), 294.

[9] Martyn, 570.

The Gospel Constituting Scripture: The Hermeneutic of the Rule of Faith

The presumption of Restoration Movement churches, of which I am a lifetime member, is that the Bible alone is sufficient for all matters of faith and practice. The approach is tightly inductive, presuming that where the Bible speaks, we speak and where the Bible is silent, we are silent. The eschewing of tradition is sometimes taken to extremes, with little exposure in the typical seminary education to patristics or early church theology and exegetical practice. There is a suspicion of theology, such that in my undergraduate education there was no course in theology. One must use caution extrapolating from the ideas found in one text to another. Employing the tools of historical criticism, each text must be studied objectively. To understand any particular verse or text requires exhaustive study of the background, the historical setting, and getting at the intent of the author. Given that the truth is in the history (it is the “historical critical” method) and that it is the world behind the text that must be delineated, there is really no end to the study. After the grammatical implications, the etymology of particular words, and the immediate context of the verse are taken into account, one can then move on to another verse. But this raises the problem of harmonizing the historical details (e.g., between the Gospels or between the epistles), to say nothing of the ideas found therein.

One might begin to suspect the unity of the Bible or the efficacy of Bible reading. The text does not seem trustworthy at multiple levels and certainly seems to fall short of being divine, as some of the church fathers would have it. The fact that a modern foundation of truth, outside of the Bible and outside of Christ, is displacing the foundation of Christ, may or may not occur to the interpreter. Friedrich Schleiermacher was pretty well aware he was no longer working under the same definition of truth set forth in the Bible, but most modern interpreters are not so bold. In the Restoration Movement, the foundation was mostly changed without anyone noticing. It was a product of 19th century Lockean rationalism and the naivete attached to modernism in general. Both conservatives and liberals lost the biblical foundation before it occurred to them to fight over it. What may be characterized as a naïve Biblicism (or even naïve anti-Biblicism) needs to be targeted, but there may also be the presumption that the alternative is an either/or solution between tradition and scripture or between theology and scripture.

There is a “rule of faith” that recognizes the preeminence of the gospel of Christ in the formation of scripture and in biblical interpretation, but this does not reduce to an easy either/or as to what weight is to be given to tradition, scripture, or theology. What it does indicate is that faith or even the formation of theology is as important to how the Bible is interpreted as anything to be found in the interpretive method itself. That is, the evangelical notion that the Bible and correct Bible reading provide the cure to every disagreement and heresy, is not only missing the primacy of faith (or in terms of the early church, the primacy of the gospel), but the necessary givenness of theory and worldview. There is no blank slate or pure induction, and this is not only the rediscovery of postmodernism but the starting premise of Christianity (e.g., Heb. 11:1).

The rule of faith (regula fidei) is not only a basic premise for reading scripture but is the situation in which scripture is constituted. 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. Scripture is a confession of faith in the crucified and risen Christ, but this faith first arises in the Apostles and is being preached before it is written. Irenaeus explains (see below) that if the apostles had left no writings that the churches they founded were a deposit of this faith, but even here ascertaining (in the second century) and understanding this gospel was on the basis of the rule of faith.

On the other hand, it is not that this rule floated free of scripture, as Irenaeus appeals to scripture in setting forth the rule of faith. He writes, “We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith.”[1]

Irenaeus is not distinguishing scripture and tradition, as both derive from the Apostles. Entailed in the reception of the gospel is the faith that what is apostolic is authoritative because it derives from Jesus and Jesus is God’s divine messenger. As John Behr writes, “So, for Irenaeus, both the true apostolic tradition maintained by the churches, and the apostolic writings themselves, derive from the same apostles, and have one and the same content, the Gospel, which is itself . . . “according to the Scriptures.”[2] Or as G. Florovsky put it, “Tradition” for the early church is “Scripture rightly understood.”[3] In the same breath Irenaeus is appealing to tradition he also says, “the demonstrations [of things contained] in the Scriptures cannot be demonstrated except from the Scriptures themselves.”[4] Or as Behr sums it up:

Irenaeus’ appeal to tradition is thus fundamentally different to that of his opponents. While they appealed to tradition precisely for that which was not in Scripture, or for principles which would legitimize their interpretation of Scripture, Irenaeus, in his appeal to tradition, was not appealing to anything else that was not also in Scripture. Thus Irenaeus can appeal to tradition, to establish his case, and at the same time maintain that Scripture cannot be understood except on the basis of Scripture itself, using its own hypothesis and canon.[5]

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. He is describing an encounter with the risen Christ, in the gospel, that is faith. This is the faith received at baptism but as he goes on to explain, this faith has a very particular form and content:

…this faith: in one God, the Father Almighty, who made the heaven and the earth and the seas and all the things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was made flesh for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who made known through the prophets the plan of salvation, and the coming, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the bodily ascension into heaven of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and his future appearing from heaven in the glory of the Father to sum up all things and to raise anew all flesh of the whole human race.[6]

This rule of faith includes loving recognition of Christ who reveals the fulness of the Trinity. There is no distinction here between economic and immanent Trinity, no notion of distinction between Jesus and the Logos and no separation of the humanity and deity of Christ. The incarnation and the Trinity are not separate subjects. The rule of faith begins with the incarnation as access to God as Trinity. As Irenaeus defines (elsewhere) “the order of the rule of our faith” is:

God, the Father, not made, not material, invisible; one God, the creator of all things: this is the first point of our faith. The second point is: The Word of God, Son of God, Christ Jesus our Lord, who was manifested to the prophets according to the form of their prophesying and according to the method of the dispensation of the Father through whom all things were made; who also at the end of the times, to complete and gather up all things, was made man among men, visible and tangible, in order to abolish death and show forth life and produce a community of union between God and man. And the third point is: The Holy Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied, and the fathers learned the things of God, and the righteous were led forth into the way of righteousness; and who in the end of the times was poured out in a new way upon mankind in all the earth, renewing man unto God.[7]

The rule of faith, which will be implicitly challenged and set aside, 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.

According to Behr, this will begin to change in the Middle Ages. Rather than beginning with the incarnation to say who God is, the incarnation began to be treated separately from the doctrine of the Trinity. The speculative possibility of treating the One God separate from the triune God and the Trinity separately from the incarnation is opened up.[8] In other words, at some point there is a loss of the rule of faith, and while this loss is marked most clearly by the condemnation of heretics, what is condemned are the conclusions reached rather than the starting point by which they were reached in both biblical interpretation and the very definition of faith.

It may be in the theology of Origen that this fulness of the rule of faith is most clearly worked out, but he is building upon what he has received. What is clear in Origen, partly due to its strangeness and contrast to later development, is his presumption that it is Christ alone that reveals the inspiration of the Hebrew scriptures: “For before the fulfilment of those events which were predicted by them, they could not, although true and inspired by God, be shown to be so, because they were as yet unfulfilled. But the coming of Christ was a declaration that their statements were true and divinely inspired.”[9] Irenaeus makes the same point: “If anyone, therefore, reads the Scriptures with attention, he will find in them an account of Christ, and a foreshadowing of the new calling.” Christ is the treasure hid in the field who brings alive the meaning of Scripture through “types and parables.”[10] Apart from Christ the reader only finds myth, “for the truth that it contains is only brought to light by the cross of Christ, and only reading it in this way do we find our way into the Wisdom of God and ourselves come to shine with his light as did Moses.”[11]

As J. Louis Martyn writes: “the fundamental arrow in the link joining scripture and gospel points from the gospel story to the scripture and not from scripture to the gospel story. In a word, with Jesus’ glorification, belief in scripture comes into being by acquiring an indelible link to Jesus’ word and deeds.”[12] Origen’s point is this reading of scripture is tied directly to “the rule of the heavenly Church of Jesus Christ [handed down] through succession from the apostles.”[13]

The rule of faith comes with a hermeneutic that is at once the gospel of Christ, Trinitarian, apocalyptic, and “spiritual” (if not in the details of Origen’s method at least implying apprehension of Christ and response in the reader). Apart from the rule of faith and its doctrinal implications (the point of On First Principles), the reader of scripture may be left with the letter, the text, the history, but will have missed the encounter with the gospel of Christ. With the spelling out and application of the doctrinal implications of the rule of faith the scriptures are opened, where otherwise they remain closed.[14]

(To register for our next class with PBI, “Reading the Bible in Community” starting the week of September 26th and running through November 18th register at https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] Against Heresies, 3.1.1

[2] John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology: The Way to Nicaea, Vol. 1, (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001) 45.

[3] Behr Citing G. Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Early Church,” GOTR 9, no. 2 (1963): 182; repr. in Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition (Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987), 75, Behr Ibid.

[4] Against Heresies, 3.12.9.

[5] Behr, Ibid.

[6] Against Heresies 1.10

[7] Irenaeus, The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, 6

[8] John Behr, John the Theologian and His Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology (Oxford University Press, 2019), 17

[9] Origen, On First Principles 4.1.6.

[10] Against Heresies, 4.26.1.

[11] Origin, On First Principles Vol. 1, translated and with Introduction by John Behr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) L.

[12] J. Louis Martyn, ‘John and Paul on the Subject of Gospel and Scripture’, in idem. Theological Issues in the Letters of Paul, Studies of the New Testament and its World (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1997), 209-30. Quoted in Behr’s Introduction to On First Principles, Ibid.

[13] Principle 4.2.2.

[14] As Herbert McCabe has written, “Watching, so to say the story of Jesus, we are watching the processions of the Trinity. That the mission in time of Son and Spirit reflect the eternal relation”. . . and more than that “they are not just reflection but sacrament – they contain the reality they signify.” In Jesus Christ we encounter the reality of God because this is who God is. The missions of the Son and the Spirit are not one episode in the story of God, this is the reality of God unfolding in the story of the Gospel. The “mission of Jesus is nothing other than the eternal generation of the Son.” Herbert McCabe, “The Involvement of God,” New Blackfriars, (November 1985) 473. Available online at https://www.scribd.com/document/327357740/The-Involvement-of-God