Tag: rule of faith

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.

Putting on the Mind of Christ Through the Rule of Faith

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.

A Conversation on Why I Am a Christian

Jessica: What’s ur biggest reason for believing Jesus is the way. The most compelling reason for believing jesus is the best.[1]  

Paul: Meaning!

Jessica: Can you Elaborate!

Paul: You ask for the “biggest reason” and so I use the word “meaning” in the broadest sense. Personal meaning is either partial, absent, or wrongheaded apart from the depth of meaning in Christ. We can find all kinds of meaning apart from Christ, and that may be good or bad or indifferent. Meaning in work, family, or even a variety of religions may give us personal satisfaction. Perhaps our skill at sports, or art, or some other area provides levels of meaning. But these will remain partial apart from a broader ground of meaning. For many, there is no meaning, and Christ is the entry point into meaning. For others, they may find meaning in the military or the mafia or a false religion, but this is the wrongheaded sort of meaning.

Beyond personal meaning but tied to this is just the possibility of meaning in the areas of philosophy, linguistics, and semiotics. Meaning systems derive from a meaningful ground and these various explorations of meaning systems ultimately find their possibility in Christ. Philosophical nihilism, pragmatism, phenomenology, etc. have the same issue as personal meaning. They may be good but incomplete, or wrong and dangerous, or they may simply conclude there is no meaning. So, the term can be applied in every area. No area of human endeavor is complete in itself, though every area may be good or bad, but will always remain partial. Of course, this is not a coercive meaning to be foisted onto us personally, scientifically, or philosophically, but it is like the word itself. It is there to be grasped and to lead us on a journey, but it is not insistent or fear inducing. Like meaning, Christ is healing, completing, and fulfilling. This is my humble attempt at the “biggest” reason.

Jessica: So, the fact that there is meaning at all convinces you of Gods existence?

Paul: I prefer meaning. This is not to say that meaninglessness is not also convincing. Most days I ward off the nihilism, the evil, the cruelty, or the seeming meaninglessness of everything. On these days or these small snippets of time, you might say I am “convinced” of God’s existence. But that does not sound exactly right. I am committed to meaning, to living a meaningful life, to being loving, and to the beauty and goodness of the universe which entails God, but my personal capacity for belief or being convinced is not very great. I feel I can make the moral commitment to the Truth (just the possibility of truth in the Truth) without being personally inclined toward a strong sense of conviction. I am well acquainted with a lack of personal spiritual devotion, with doubts and disbelief, but my own proclivities are not the point. I have never considered either my capacity for belief nor my tendency toward doubt as primary. Belief is no great accomplishment, and to think it is, is the problem in imagining doubt is determinative of salvation or moral engagement. The focus on individual belief misses the New Testament meaning of faith, which does not refer to my faith but to Christ’s faithfulness, of which I can partake. I have no faith in my faith or in faith in general, but the faithfulness of Christ is salvific. Saving, not in the sense of going to heaven and missing hell, but in the sense of delivering from bondage: bondage to my capacity, my thought, myself and the values of my culture.

This is a form of belief and of being convinced, but it is not the form in which we usually discuss these things. Most are thinking of historical and scientific proofs, but this will only lead to the endless need for more and stronger proof. Belief and faith are largely moral commitments that engage us more holistically than typical proofs. I am full of doubt, but this doubt is not the kind that many may find so disturbing, as my faith embraces doubt as part of the reality in which I believe.

The doubt that many have, is grounded in an ultimate trust in reason, in which there is no room for doubt. Thus, apologetics must be airtight. The Bible must be inerrant. Tradition cannot contain fallacy. Doubt is not part of the possibility of this form of faith. Undeniable philosophical arguments and the absolute historical trustworthiness of the texts is required. This foundationalism and Biblicism is focused on rationalism or Scripture rather than Christ. It trusts the authority of history and reason more than Christ. This sort of foundationalism has displaced Christ with reason, Scripture, history, or some other authority as foundation.

Jessica: I think I understand, but you are saying too much too quickly. I have been reading Sam Harris and he has many convincing proofs that Jesus never existed and that God does not exist.

Paul: Sorry, my wife tells me I overcomplicate things.

The issue is not between different sorts of meaning or levels of meaning, but whether there is meaning or no meaning. The new atheists, such as Sam Harris, like fundamentalists, liberals, and modernists of every stripe presume a foundation of meaning and this is their starting point. One can use this foundation to argue for the inerrancy of the Bible, the truth of secular humanism, the self-contained truth of science, or basic principles (“I Think”, there is cause and effect”) or whatever, but all share the modernist foundation. The way in which they build upon this presumed philosophical rationalism varies, but they all share the modern rationalist presumption of a given meaning. This presumed foundation is a parasite on the meaning set forth in Christianity, but it is incorrect (in its atheistic, fundamentalist, and liberal manifestation) in that its imagined meaning floats free of the person of Christ.

Jessica: I have started reading David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions.

Paul: Excellent! Hart quickly and accurately debunks the New Atheists.

I prefer a more hard-core atheism, such as that of Slavoj Žižek, who recognizes the construct of meaning (and self) are easily deconstructed. As a true atheist, he does not argue on the basis of meaning, but he makes the case that beneath the structure of “self” is the reification of language which fabricates the self (and meaning) through the interplay of language – on the order of the Cartesian cogito (“I think therefore I am”). Žižek is Cartesian, not because he believes Descartes is correct in his foundationalism, but because he considers the Cartesian error or lie, the basis for “truth.” That is, there is no Truth, but only the lie which gives rise to truth. This is a better understanding of the choice with which we are faced. True nihilism and atheism do not hold to meaning of any sort, other than that which can be fabricated.

So, I prefer meaning as opposed to no meaning. I prefer love, beauty, and goodness as opposed to hatred and evil, and this entails the world revealed by Christ.

Jessica: But what about the contradictions in the Bible?

Paul: The focus of the Bible is not on itself or its own authority, but it is a witness to the authority of Christ.The founding premise of Scripture is set forth by John: “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has exegeted Him” (John 1:18). The revelation of Christ precedes and makes possible the writing of the New Testament and the formation of the canon of Scripture. There would be no Scripture apart from its formation around the work of Christ. It is not just that Christ precedes Scripture, but faith in Christ (the “rule of faith”) precedes and is the means of exegeting Scripture (and in particular was the early church’s means of incorporating the Hebrew Scriptures into the Christian canon of Scripture). This means that the reality of Christ not only precedes Scripture, but precedes the unfolding political and cultural realities of our day.

The primacy of Christ implies an exegetical method which is not primarily historical, literal, or attached to a book. That is, if we take this passage (John 1:18) literally, this means the rest of Scripture must fit this fact. The primacy of Christ is the means of Scripture and its interpretation, and apart from this primacy the letter is bent in every direction (e.g., Jesus the warrior, the upholder of national and cultural interests). The Old Testament is filled with conflicting images, which if given equal weight (and literality), displace the literal fact of Christ as exegete. Christ brings together the sign and signified, enfleshing meaning, such that to make Scripture the foundation of meaning is to set the sign afloat, separating it from it from its signified. A biblicism or sola scriptura which does not recognize Scripture as derived from Christ has taken images of violence and warfare, images of sacrifice and law, or simply interpretations of history, and imagined that Christ must be made to accommodate this order. The images of God in the Bible (Old and New Testaments), require the Gospel, require that all of the Bible be read in the light of faith in Christ.

As Origen put it, “If you want to understand, you can only do so through the Gospel.” The Gospel (Jesus Christ) makes the Bible the Word of God for each of its contemporary readers. The analogy of faith, or the rule of faith or, to say the same thing, the Gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (among many other 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). Paul is referencing the only Scriptures he knew, the Hebrew Bible. Apart from these events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of the life of Christ, the Scriptures become a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. Christ is a revelation which inspires Scripture, and this revelation constitutes the center of Christian thought. Apart from this center, it is not clear Christian thought survives. Apart from Christ there is no Bible, there is no authority, there is no meaning, but only a bundle of contradictions. In light of Christ, the contradictions do not completely disappear but they are relatively unimportant in light of the fulness of meaning revealed in Christ.

Jessica: I think I am beginning to grasp some of what you are saying, but have you written anything that might help?

Paul: I will recommend a few of my blogs, which I have referenced above and which expand on the topic.[2]

(Sign up for the class Human Language, Signs of God: using Anthony Bartlett’s two books, Theology Beyond Metaphysics and Signs of Change, as one continuous argument.  The course will run from 2025/9/16 to 2025/11/4. Register here: https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/)

[1] This question arose through messenger and continued on the phone, and I have taken liberties with how it unfolded and have changed the name of the inquirer, but it is based in reality.

[2] Here is a piece on reading Scripture through Christ and the Gospel https://forgingploughshares.org/2025/02/06/the-scriptures-gospel-and-the-exegesis-of-jesus/ I have done several on Hermeneutics. This one is on Origen’s approach: https://forgingploughshares.org/2022/09/22/the-peaceful-hermeneutic-of-origin-the-end-of-deicide/ As is this one: https://forgingploughshares.org/2024/11/07/finding-the-center-in-the-midst-of-despair/

The Analogy of Faith as a Mindset and Ethic

The analogy of faith, or the rule of faith or, to say the same thing, the gospel, is a hermeneutic or interpretive lens which unveils the meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures (among many other 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). Apart from these events in the life of Christ, it would be hard to locate such things in the Scriptures, but given the reality of the life of Christ, the Scriptures became a means of understanding these events and these events unveil the meaning of Scripture. As John Behr writes, “Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context, within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it.”[1] In other words, the object is not simply to understand the historical setting of Scripture, or the intent of the author, but to understand Christ according to the Scriptures.

 Behr expertly lays out the interworking of the apostolic preaching, the rule of faith, and the role of Scripture, but his explanation falls short in explaining how, 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 (as Freud describes the superego image) into the self as part of one’s character and one’s apprehension of the world.

The analogy of faith is partly understood as an alternative to the law. The law is a definitive measure but where the law could be compared to a tutor, leading a student to school, faith is not an objective rule outwardly coercing, but an inward perspective or critical faculty (Gal. 3:25). This is an obvious point that may be lost where doctrine or creeds or propositional language pushes out the personal, the ethical, or the sense in which faith is a living hypothesis and not a dead letter. There is nothing inherently wrong with doctrine or creeds or propositional language, but where the literal, the fleshly, or the law become primary, the letter displaces the Spirit. Letters, propositions, and doctrines are a necessity but not an end or goal but a means. Just as letters are held together by larger units of meaning, the Word (the Gospel, the apostolic tradition) constitutes the unity of meaning in light of which the world is apprehended.

Paul explains that the analogy of faith works in conjunction with preaching and teaching. 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.

For Paul it is not enough that the Corinthians have an authoritative apostle (himself), or that they have appointed bishops and shepherds, some of whom are apparently abusing their position through an extreme authoritarianism. The Corinthians are eager to submit to various authorities and are pitting one authority against another, with some saying “I am of Paul,” and another, “I am of Apollos” (I Cor. 3:4). Some would pit their leader, their bishop, or their teacher, against that of others. Paul does not presume to grab a scepter and robe and set himself up as final authority, nor does he allow Apollos such a position. Nor does he say, “Look ye unto Peter, who sits upon the seat of Christ.” Rather, he says, “What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth” (I Cor. 3:5–7). God is the one who causes growth, and this growth is not simply corporate or institutional but is personal and individual and very much interconnected with applying the analogy of faith. This analogy or rule is the primary authority Paul is concerned to establish.

Obviously, Paul exercises authority (just in the fact that he is writing a letter) but his is not a coercive authoritarianism, but is one that pleads, persuades, argues, and even in his estimate – uses hyperbole, exaggeration, and bragging (2 Cor. 11:16-12:13). In his challenge of Peter in Antioch, in his acknowledged offering of opinions, and in the very mode of his persuasive letter writing, Paul is demonstrating the very mind-set of Christ that he would instill in the Christians under his care. He would call out Peter, he would challenge the apostolic council in regard to Gentiles, but he feels this confidence not simply because he too is an apostle, but because he is calling the apostles themselves to follow the standard or rule of faith which governs them all. They are all subject to the rule of faith, such that the apostles themselves must not veer from the apostolic tradition in which their authority consists.

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). But 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.” “As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ” (Eph. 4:14-15). This measure and authority is one that each is to take up.

Paul’s main concern is not that the Corinthians obey him, or that they revere his letters; his main concern is that they put on the mind of Christ and become spiritual minded in their thinking. The Corinthians and all Christians are to judge by the measure of faith. This measure breaks down the inherent hostility contained in human measure or in the measure of the law. The law requires a wall of hostility as part of its function. It is inherently divisive but Christ as measure is peace: “For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in ordinances” (Eph. 2:14-15).

The turn from the rule of faith, which is Christ, to ordinances, creeds, doctrines, etc. has not only produced unending division in the church but has given rise to violence, in which Christians participate in bloodshed against one another and against the enemies declared outside the bounds of Christian love.

Paul had predicted as much to the Galatians, explaining that those who insist on the law “bite and devour one another” as they are judging according to the flesh (Ga. 5:15). “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the Law” (Ga 5:18). The singular principal Paul invokes is neighbor love, “For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF’” (Ga. 5:14). This is a measure to be lived out, and by its very nature it disrupts what Paul sees as the desire undergirding the law: becoming “boastful, challenging one another, envying one another” (Ga. 5:26) and ultimately “biting and devouring one another.” In contrast, the rule of faith is a means to peace and unity, and by definition is a promotion of the love and peace of Christ. He himself is our Peace as the measure by which we attain to the unity of the faith.

We have two measures or two rules to choose from: the human measure and the measure of Christ. The human measure, the law, or the law of sin and death, is inherently a violent measure and the measure of Christ is inherently peaceful. It is in the life of Christ that we see these two measures set against one another. By the rule of man Christ dies, so that human measure ends in deicide. The force that killed Christ, namely the law or the measure of man, is countered by Christ and Christian witnesses (martyrs). 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. The earliest accounts of the rule of faith outside of the New Testament link the rule of faith to this peaceful nonviolence.

The Didache (written in the first century A. D.), provides instructions for the Christian life, which in the first part is entitled “Two Ways, the Way of Life and the Way of Death.” It may have served as basic instruction to catechumens or those studying to be baptized, and it is focused on the doctrine of love and Jesus’ ethical teaching. The way of life is characterized by loving God, loving one’s neighbor, and loving one’s enemies by following Jesus’ ethic of nonviolence. The text (as do most all of the early explanations of the rule of faith) references Matthew 5:39-44 (containing Jesus’ commands of nonviolent resistance, or radical subordination) and sets forth a “way of life,” which sums up the point of part one. In other words, the Didache provides a measurement for Christian living that is founded upon Jesus’ own teaching.

Justin Martyr (100-165) in his First Apology also speaks of the rule of faith. Writing to emperor Antonius Pius, he describes Christian nonviolence as offering no threat to Rome, as Christians serve a heavenly kingdom: “For if we looked for a human kingdom, we should also deny our Christ, that we might not be slain; and we should strive to escape detection, that we might obtain what we expect. But since our thoughts are not fixed on the present, we are not concerned when men cut us off; since also death is a debt which must at all events be paid.”[2] He describes the kingdom established among Christians as bringing to pass the prophecy of Isaiah 2:3: “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” As a result, “we who formerly used to murder one another do not only now refrain from making war upon our enemies, but also, that we may not lie nor deceive our examiners, willingly die confessing Christ.”[3] He points to “the case of many who once were of your way of thinking, but have changed their violent and tyrannical disposition, being overcome either by the constancy which they have witnessed in their neighbors’ lives, or by the extraordinary forbearance they have observed in their fellow-travelers (Christians) when defrauded, or by the honesty of those with whom they have transacted business.”[4] These proofs he puts forward are people, Christians whose lives are governed by a rule of enemy-love and non-violence. The rule is not simply an objective rule, but the means to grow in love and peace.

Tertullian (160-220) likewise, addressing “rulers of the Roman Empire,” explains that Christians are persecuted unjustly because they love their enemies and are forbidden to retaliate. “If we are enjoined, then, to love our enemies, as I have remarked above, whom have we to hate? If injured, we are forbidden to retaliate, lest we become as bad ourselves: who can suffer injury at our hands?” He asks, “banded together as we are, ever so ready to sacrifice our lives, what single case of revenge for injury are you able to point to.”[5] This nonviolent form of life, in which Christians are charged to love their enemies, Tertullian explains, “is the rule of truth which comes down from Christ by transmission through his companions” (the apostles).[6] Christians have exchanged the law of retribution for the law of truth and nonviolence, and as a result Rome gains more than it has lost.

In Ignatius of Antioch’s (died 108) letter to Polycarp, Ignatius explains how the law of nonviolence replaces the weapons of war with those of peace: “Let your baptism endure as your arms; your faith as your helmet; your love as your spear; your patience as a complete panoply.”[7] Human law calls for violent preparation through weapons of war, but the law of peace taught by Christ exchanges military equipment with the equipment of love, patience and faith.

The analogy of faith is not simply a measurement or rule aimed at sorting out propositions, setting up creeds, and establishing doctrine. The rule of faith is an ethic and a characteristic way of thinking which is to govern the life of the mind and body of the Christian.

[1] John Behr, Formation of Christian Theology: The Way to Nicaea, Vol. 1, (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001), 27-28.

[2] Justin Martyr, Apologia I, 11.

[3] Ibid., 39.

[4] Ibid., 16.

[5] Tertullian, Apology 37.

[6] Ibid., 47.

[7] Ignatius, To Polycarp 6.2.

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