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Some of our earliest Christian writings are those
produced by the Apostle Paul and are therefore crucial to our
understanding of the first stages of Christianity. Arguably, one of the
most significant aspects of these letters relates to Paul’s teaching
on salvation (soteriology).
Of particular importance is his letter to the church at
Galatia
. It was written at a critical point in Paul’s ministry. In it, he can
be seen to be struggling to articulate how ‘his gospel’ (as he
describes it in Romans 2:16) relates to the Christianity that was being
expressed by the church at
Jerusalem
and to the Jewish faith per se (with
particular reference to the observance of the Jewish law).
This aspect of Galatians has recently been the attention of
doctoral research conducted by Kyuseok Han at the
University
of
Birmingham
. His Ph.D. thesis, entitled 'Pauline
Soteriology in Galatians with Special Reference to Pistis Christou', examines Paul’s
presentation of salvation in the letter to the Galatians.
Faith
in or of Christ
Kyuseok’s research argues that, in Galatians, Paul is in fact
attempting to develop a Christ-centred understanding of salvation out of
an existing Jewish pattern. Fundamental to Paul’s presentation is his
use of the pistis
Christou
construction (whether it should be translated as ‘faith in
Christ’ or the faith of
Christ’ – we also look at this question in one of our coffee-break
posers).
Kyuseok advocates a ‘subjective reading’ (that is, the
faith of Christ) which
promotes Paul’s drive to establish a schema of salvation which has
Christ – rather than the human response - at the centre. Consequently,
according to Kyuseok’s reading interprets Galatians 2:16 (a pivotal
verse) as:
... a
person is not justified by works of the law, unless he (or
she) comes through [the] faith of Jesus Christ...
Faith or Faithfulness
Kyuseok’s
work also addresses whether the word pistis
(faith) denotes ‘faith’ (as in belief) or ‘faithfulness’. He is
critical of traditional proponents of the ‘subjective reading’ for
uncritically assuming that pistis
denotes ‘faithfulness’ (specifically Christ’s sacrificial act on
the cross), rather than considering its other uses. He goes on to argue
that Paul uses the book of Habakkuk as a model, identifying that it is
God’s faithfulness to the vision concerning the ‘community of the
righteous’ (Hab 2:4 and 2:6-20) that is key to its membership. In
other words, its members must rely (for entry and continued membership)
entirely upon the faith of God. Kyuseok suggests that
Paul sees the ministry of Christ as an analogue to that of Habakkuk, in
that Christ also prophetically taught about the (re)-establishment of
God’s community of the righteous ones.
Paul's
Christ-centred Salvation
In this sense, the pistis Christou construction
should be viewed as, what Kyuseok describes as, “Paul’s theological
keynote”. He argues that;
Unlike
the wide range of Greek idioms which represent ‘faith in Christ’,
Paul deliberately used this formulation to denote the ‘faith of Jesus
Christ’. In so doing, it demonstrates a move away from theocentrical
Jewish expression to Pauline Christology which supplants the divine
grace in Jewish covenantal nomism with a Christological term.
Galatians can therefore be seen to be an early articulation of a
specifically Christian soteriology which is centred on the figure of
Christ and his ‘divine act’.
Kyuseok underlines the
importance of his research by asserting that, without considering the
subjective genitive reading (Christ’s faith), “Christological
soteriology may well be reduced merely to the anthropological plane, to
the extent that it could produce the false impression that humankind
can, of itself, supply the means of salvation.” In other words, there
is a danger of giving the impression that salvation can be attained by
human endeavour (expressed as faith) alone.
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