Lent 2019: Tuesday, April 9 - Justification Through the Faith of Jesus Christ

Since the years of the Reformation, Protestants have claimed that they are justified by faith alone.  But whose faith are we talking about?  Is it our faith?  Is it Jesus' faith?  Or is it both?

Leithart points to three different texts to help us work through this.  First, we look at Galatians 3:22:

"But Scripture has locked up everything under the control of sin, so that what was promised, being given through faith in Jesus Christ, might be given to those who believe."

The NIV translates this phrase in such a way that the promise given to Abraham comes through our believing in Jesus Christ.  In other words, our faith is the source of this gift.  But the word translated "in" is the Greek word ek which can also mean "of".  There is not an easy way to decide this, as numerous biblical scholars line up on either side.  Some claim Paul means, "in".  This would be the objective genitive - it's our's, our faith placed objectively in one outside of ourselves - Jesus.  Others claim Paul means, "of" - the faith of Jesus Christ.  This would be the subjective genitive - it's Jesus' own faith as a subject.  Leithart points out that if we take it to refer to our own faith in Jesus, we have a redundancy in the text.  Believers' faith is the source of the promise.  Believers' also receive the promise.  This begins to unravel when we think of Abraham: if Abraham believed God, why couldn't he have realized the promise himself?  Translated this way, we lose the significance of who Christ is and what he has done.  If we use the subjective genitive, it makes more sense.  Instead of describing two functions of human faith, the text describes two different events: Jesus' act of faith, and the faith of those who respond to it.  In that case, we have the "faith of Jesus Christ," or Christ's completed work, and the faith of those who trust in that work.

The problem of repetition comes up in our second text: Galatians 2:16:

"(We who are Jews) know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.  So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified."

Again, the word translated "in" could also mean "of."  As the NIV translates it, there is a similar redundancy as we just saw, and we find Paul basically repeating himself three times: "We are justified by believing in Jesus, so we have believed in Jesus, so we can be justified by believing in Jesus.  On the contrary, if we are attentive to the difference between Christ's work and our response, we see that the passage is organized chiastically:

a  Knowing that a man does not receive the delivering verdict by what the law does
    b   but through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ
         c  we have have believed in Christ Jesus
    b'  so that we may receive the delivering verdict by the faithfulness of Christ
a'  and not by what the law does, since by what the law does no flesh shall receive the verdict. (Delivered, 189)

In other words, Paul uses repetition about Christ's faithful work to show us more clearly the meaning about our faithful response to his work.  Christ's faith is the source of our faith, and our faith is also the way we participate in Christ's faith.

Human believers' response to Jesus is not undermined by this approach.  Rather, our faith is more established because we are reminded of what we are responding to.  Jesus' faith funds our faith, just as Jesus' justification funds ours.  Jesus' justification occurs in his resurrection.  Leithart writes:

"It happens to Jesus in his death and resurrection: he is the first justified man, the only man justified because of his obedience.  Every other deliverdict depends entirely on his vindication in the Spirit.  Justification happens to the whole human race as God condemns sinful flesh and enables humans in flesh to live, as Jesus did, by the Spirit.  Sin, death, flesh used to reign over the human race, but now there is a new regime of the Spirit.  It happens to the church, and it happens to individuals in the church as they are justified from sin in baptism and raised to live lives of justice..." (Delivered, 188)

In that case, what is faith?

Finally, we come to our third Scripture text: Galatians 2:19-20.

"For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God.  I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me."

Jesus' death puts an end to Torah, so Paul's trust in Torah is also put to death.  His whole identity, as a Jew by nature, is ended and has no further validity.  It is a death.  And although he still lives in flesh, he does not regard, measure, or judge himself by fleshly achievements, but by something outside himself.

So does Paul live by faith in the Son of God, or by the faith of the Son of God?  Leithart writes:

"That it is difficult to decide is no accident.  It is supposed to be difficult, even impossible, to decide.  Paul lives a life in the flesh, but that life is no longer his own.  Whatever life Paul lives, it is Christ's life lived out in Paul." (Delivered, 192)

Faith ultimately is a grasping of what was promised to Abraham - that the curse would be broken by Christ's resurrection from the dead.  Living by faith now would mean two things: 1) not regarding, measuring, judging ourselves by what we have up to now (fleshly standards and achievements) and 2) our on-going lives display Christ's life.  His life in ours.  Christ recapitulates his life in mine - his faithfulness unto death, the life he lives by the Spirit.  In other words, living by faith means trusting that in Christ's death and resurrection, we have also died and been risen.

It is only by showing what the Scripture says that we can come to a definition of faith that reflects this whole story.  So often in our society, people talk about 'faith' in such a way that it means little more than the person's own self-assertiveness.  Os Guinness describes eight pitfalls of American religion, all of which start with 'p,' all of which have to do with an erroneous notion of faith:

There is polarization between the heart and the mind so that we depend on what we feel, rather than careful thought.

Pietism encourages us to focus on our experiences.

Primitivism encourages us to find a simple obedience to Scriptures like the early church did and to delude ourselves into thinking we don't need to bother at all with 2,000 years of church history.

Populism discourages us from trusting those who have thought long and carefully about these things.  After all, they're just elitist.

In a pluralist society, different Christians believe different things, but that doesn't matter compared to how we live.  Thus, beliefs are erroneously divided from action.  We get deeds without creeds.

In a pragmatic society, faith becomes less about doing what is right, then it is about doing whatever works.  Faith becomes more about our own comfort and prosperity than it is about Jesus.

Philistinism makes all the rest of these reactionary.  We become proud of our simple faith, equating it entirely with a type of common sense, discouraging us from considering faith as something which we should think about and maybe even question.

Pessimistic interpretations of Scripture encourage us to think of faith as primarily an escape pod from a condemned earth, rather than a way to live a new kind of existence in this earth. (Fit Bodies, Fat Minds, pp. 38-64)

Guinness' list is extremely helpful in diagnosing types of 'faith' that are not very biblical at all, but primarily about ourselves.  On the contrary, the faith that saves is Jesus' faith.  Through his death and resurrection, he breaks the curse of Eden and Babel.  Our faith responds to his.  Our faith matches his, and takes on the same pattern.  As he dies and rises, so we consider ourselves dead to sin and alive in him.  As he condemns the regime of death in his own death, and is delivered to a new life in the Spirit, so we consider ourselves to have left the regime of death, and are now participants in the new regime of the Spirit.  Our faith is so important not because it accomplishes salvation, but because in light of Christ's salvation, it allows us to regard, measure, and judge ourselves in a new way.

What would evangelism look like that placed more emphasis on Christ's faith than on our own?  Fleming Rutledge suggested that perhaps many evangelistic formulas emphasize repentance in a way that stays human-centered: sin-repentance-grace-forgiveness.  We are sinners.  We ought to repent of our sin.  When we do this, God will be gracious and forgive us.  It's hard to see what Christ has definitely done in a process like this.  On the contrary, she proposes this sort of process: grace-sin-deliverance-repentance-grace. (192)  It forms a chiasm:

a   grace
     b  sin
         c   deliverance
     b' repentance
a'  grace

God graciously gives us life.  But in sin, all creation came under the power of death in exile.  In Christ, God judges sin in the flesh.  Raising him from the dead, God delivers the world from the power of death.  As such, baptism tells us we are no longer under the power of death, but under the Spirit who brings us to life.  We consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to Christ.  And God will graciously turn more and more of the world into church, a new creation reconciled to him.

In this process, the individual's faithful response to this story would not be some sort of heroic leap, but a response to Jesus' own faithful work.

This account of evangelism coincides very well with what we've said here - that justification primarily comes through Jesus' faith, and that it is only as he is justified that we can experience this ourselves.  This gospel of Jesus' faithfulness, of condemnation and justification as two different realms, and of re-entry into Eden gets us beyond mere behavior modification, and faith as self-assertiveness.  This is more along the lines of good news, proclaiming a new reality that gladdens the heart, eliciting the saving faith of believers by the prior and more foundational saving faith of the faithful one himself - Jesus, and uniting us to the death-and-resurrection pattern of Jesus' own life so that we truly become like him.  Our following him is a taking up of the cross, a dying and rising, a life of 'living sacrifice' by virtue of Jesus' sacrifice.  With Christ living in us, we become 'little Christs,' to use C.S. Lewis' phrase. 

We come back to our original question.  Whose faith is this?  It's both.  We are justified by faith alone - Christ's and ours.  It becomes increasingly hard to tell which is which.  Is this Christ's faith, or is it mine?  As Paul found out and articulated in Galatians 2:20, Christ's faith is not just something outside himself, but has become something Paul actually participates in.  So it is for us.  The more we look at Christ's faithfulness, the more we see that the Spirit's work brings Christ to life in us.  What started as something we viewed objectively as outside us increasingly becomes something we experience subjectively within us.  Collectively too, we see the church not only as a people Christ brought together, but a people Christ is alive in.