Teresa Morgan's remarkably thorough work, with its provocative thesis, will undoubtedly stimulate further discussion of the understanding of faith in earliest Christianity.Footnote ¹² Three features of Morgan's treatment of the topic deserve recognition. First, she approaches the topic by seeking to reconstruct the way πίστις (under the influence of the Latin usage of fides) was understood in everyday life within the early Roman Empire (l'histoire des mentalités). The concepts of faith and faithfulness appear regularly in description of the social relations between masters and slaves, patrons and benefactors, husbands and wives, and, of course, also of that between gods and humans.Footnote ¹³ Secondly, Morgan treats the πίστις word group as expressing a relational idea that centres on reciprocal trust and trustworthiness.Footnote ¹⁴ This conception of trust was fundamental to the earliest Christian mission, which made use of the Greco-Roman conceptual environment in which it emerged and evolved. It was only with time that propositional content came to prominence within early Christianity and πίστις came to take on the sense of ‘faith’ or ‘belief’.Footnote ¹⁵ Thirdly, Morgan commends the ethical relevance of the conception of πίστις as trust/trustworthiness, especially as it appears in the New Testament writings and the Scriptures. Abraham appears, through time and the experience of God's trustworthiness, as one who came to trust in God. In this experience of trust he came to be trustworthy himself, resulting in a ‘cascade’ of trust and trustworthiness – faith and faithfulness – that continued into the subsequent life of Israel. Within earliest Christianity, Jesus came to be regarded as playing a fundamental role in mediating faithfulness/faith between God and human beings as he mediated salvation itself. He was faithful both towards God and towards human beings, and thereby came to be the font of a new community of trust and trustworthiness.Footnote ¹⁶

In various significant ways Morgan's treatment of faith touches on issues both ancient and modern that we cannot explore here.Footnote ¹⁷ I would like to raise questions with regard to three dimensions of Morgan's work: linguistic, contextual and ethical.

First, the linguistic questions. I must confess that I never have been convinced that the two distinct ideas of ‘faith’ and ‘faithfulness’ are consistently conjoined in the usage of πίστις. Only in specific collocations, such as the giving of a promise, do the two ideas of believing and trusting coincide. Morgan is fully aware of this issue and for most part avoids confusion.Footnote ¹⁸ Occasionally, however, a fusion of language and thought seems to emerge in her work, as for example when she states the aim of her study: ‘And I shall try to show the importance of an aspect of pistis …: the fact that it is, first and foremost, neither a body of beliefs nor a function of the heart and mind, but a relationship which creates community.’Footnote ¹⁹ While πίστις generally (although not always) implies a relationship of trust or fidelity, (1) it is not clear that this relationship is expressed by the term itself (or those related to it) and not instead by the context in which it appears; (2) nor is it clear that such a relationship constitutes an ‘aspect’ of a larger concept.Footnote ²⁰ As Morgan observes, each context must be examined for itself, without prior assumptions. This comment is directed towards traditional interpretation of the New Testament, which has been, perhaps, too quick to render given instances of πίστις as ‘faith’ or ‘believing’. But it applies to Morgan's thesis as well. Everything depends on context. And it is the question of context – which may be extended quite broadly – that is central to any debate about Morgan's thesis.

Secondly, Morgan's thesis depends considerably on the priority that she assigns to the concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘trustworthiness’ in the usage of πίστις (under the influence of the usage of fides) within the early Roman Empire. Morgan's dispute with Bultmann may be seen in this light. She criticises Bultmann's description of faith for Paul as determined by its object, so that it is something other than a general trust in God. It bears instead a ‘dogmatic’ character.Footnote ²¹ Morgan herself affirms that πίστις generally does have some dogmatic dimension, since as a signifier of ‘trust’ it presupposes a relationship in which duties are defined. In her view, however, Bultmann stretches the meaning of πίστις beyond acceptable limits. Faith is something more than assent to the propositional content of the Gospel. Bultmann would agree with this objection. He, too, finds that πίστις and πιστεύω may express the sense of ‘trust’, as well as ‘faithfulness’ and also ‘obedience’.Footnote ²² He differs from Morgan – and this marks the critical question in debate – in that he finds a specifically Christian sense of πίστις, namely, the acceptance of the message concerning Christ which is marked as a ‘saving faith’.Footnote ²³ That is not to say that other ideas such as trust, hope and faithfulness are excluded, or that ‘acceptance of the kerygma’ is the only meaning of πίστις that appears in the New Testament.Footnote ²⁴ Bultmann merely regards it as a distinctive usage of early Christianity that arises from the particularity of its object.Footnote ²⁵ Here we touch on the nineteenth-century question as to whether the historically particular is possible,Footnote ²⁶ and return to the question of the determinative context for understanding the early Christian conception of ‘faith’.

I likewise must confess that I remain unconvinced of Morgan's claim, drawn from cultural historiography, that ‘new communities forming themselves within an existing culture do not typically … assign [language] radically new meanings’ or that the evolution of new meanings within the community requires time.Footnote ²⁷ In the first place, it is not clear that ‘faith’ regarded in terms of cognitive content was radically new. Would the Greek philosophical tradition have been entirely alien to the first Christians?Footnote ²⁸ One may further raise the question as to whether this description applies to earliest Christianity. A good number of the first converts to this new religious movement came from the synagogue, where they had been exposed to the language-world of the Scriptures.Footnote ²⁹ As we know, it is remarkable with how much Scripture Paul expects his converts in Corinth to be familiar. Many would have learned a new vocabulary already in a Diaspora synagogue, just as they would have learned one upon entering any of the various mystery cults.Footnote ³⁰ From the very start, Greeks in contact with the synagogue would have entered into the linguistic world of early Judaism, and would have understood the early Christian call to πίστις in a way shaped by that world. The same is true in some measure for new converts from paganism. Paul expects his readers in Thessalonica to absorb essential elements of early Jewish thought and language, especially apocalyptic expectations, even though he nowhere appeals to the Scriptures in 1 Thessalonians. From the very start the Thessalonians had learned, as undoubtedly others had done, that ὁ Χριστός referred to the Anointed One of Israel. And they waited in expectation for ‘the Son’ from heaven.Footnote ³¹ Conversion entailed a linguistic conversion: new wine required new wine skins.

Secondly, it is arguable that new religious movements assign new meanings to language in their very genesis. They do so, one may suggest, not because they are ‘forming themselves within an existing culture’, but instead because, in Niebuhrian terms, they are forming themselves against an existing culture, constituting a counterculture.Footnote ³² Development of language in this instance is not a question of new usage finding a place within the broader culture, but of linguistic innovation taking place in protest within the counterculture. The ‘explosive increase’ in the language of ‘faith’ that appears in the New Testament writings itself raises the possibility that a semantic shift may be taking place with respect to this cluster of terms.Footnote ³³ It furthermore does not seem irrelevant to observe that the small Jewish sect that later came to be called Christianity assigned a new meaning to language in naming itself ‘the Way’.Footnote ³⁴ Nor is it without significance that Paul's letters contain a number of neologisms with which he expected his readers to come to terms.Footnote ³⁵ The language of the New Testament apocalypse – which understandably has been compared to that of new religious movements – most likely represents an intentional idiolect.Footnote ³⁶ The new message of ‘the Gospel’ resulted in a new genre, the written Gospel, which bore its own semantic implications. None of these semantic changes would have been incomprehensible to a Hellenistic audience. But, like the message itself, they probably would have been heard as something new.Footnote ³⁷

Admittedly, the New Testament writings were composed primarily for internal consumption. This observation, however, touches upon the contested point. It is obvious that the first Christians communicated their good news to their contemporaries. But aside from Paul's open rejection of the usual practice of rhetoric, there is precious little said in the New Testament about communicating the Gospel or how one is to do so. The focus of the community remained on the message itself, which in its very newness – both conceptual and linguistic – proved attractive. I find it therefore altogether likely that early Christians would have been quite ready to use the πίστις word group with a distinct emphasis on the cognitive content of the kerygma, even if that sense was new to their contemporaries.Footnote ³⁸ That is not to say that all of their usage of πίστις and related terms shifted in this way. Nor is it to say that the relational dimension of πίστις was lost in this shift: the message of the Gospel was understood to bring a new and abiding relation with the one, true God.Footnote ³⁹

That brings us to Morgan's reading of the Septuagint. Within its stories, I would argue, the childless Abraham's encounter with the Lord's promise of offspring appears more as a decisive moment rather than a step in the development of trust, which then, in a cascade, is transmitted to others. The subsequent narratives of Hagar and Abimelech tell of Abraham's violation of his moment of trust in both possible ways. The Lord does not seem intent on building Abraham's trust either. After the birth of Isaac, the Lord's only trust-building measure is to compel Abraham to child-sacrifice, a demand from which he relents only in the last moment. The divine promise prevails against all odds over Abraham and even over God's own self. In the following stories of Scripture, Israel for its part seems hell-bent on frustrating the divine purpose at nearly every step of the way. The faithfulness of God is met repeatedly with the faithlessness of his people, to which God then responds with all the wrath of a betrayed spouse.Footnote ⁴⁰ And yet, as the story goes, God all along the way intervenes savingly for his people in his words and works. The language of ‘faith’, especially the verbal form πιστεύω, often appears in connection with these events. In such ‘oracular’ contexts it is frequently the divine word, in the form of a promise, that is either believed and trusted or disbelieved and thus sometimes is said to have been disobeyed.Footnote ⁴¹ Here it is difficult if not impossible to distinguish between ‘believing God's words’ and ‘trusting God’. The two coincide. To be sure, πίστις terminology also frequently expresses simply the idea of faithfulness in the Septuagint. But it is also clear that ‘believing’ or ‘trusting’ God in words of promise appears prominently in the text. In such instances ‘believing’ and ‘trusting’ coincide.Footnote ⁴²

These are the texts that the New Testament writers take up.Footnote ⁴³ And it is this sense, I think, that predominates in the New Testament writings and which constitutes the particular understanding of faith that appears there.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is hard to explain the diverse ‘faiths’ that appear there apart from the variations in the articulation of the Gospel to which they are connected. It was God's work in the crucified and risen Jesus that the earliest Christians proclaimed and which they articulated in various ways.Footnote ⁴⁵ Within the context of early Judaism this form of proclamation, with its emphasis on content, was necessary. Otherwise, why would one not simply trust in the God of Abraham? Or why would one not simply ‘believe (or trust) in the commandments’ along with the Psalmist (LXX Ps 118.66)?Footnote ⁴⁶

Furthermore, the call to ‘repentance’ that we find in the Gospels and Acts was not limited to the earliest proclamation within a Jewish context. It applied to the Gentiles as well, indeed, especially to them. Paul reminds the Thessalonians that they had ‘turned to God from idols, to serve the living and true God’ (1 Thess 1.9). The resonance of this vivid expression with the prophetic literature and the psalms is obvious. Coming to trust in the God who raised Jesus from the dead is presented not as a process, but as a crisis. It is a turning away from one object of trust to another. Not to believe or trust the Gospel is to have another object of trust. It is worth recalling that when Paul speaks of justifying faith bringing ‘peace with God through our Lord, Jesus Christ’ he is speaking of the overcoming of enmity of human beings towards God and not of that of God towards them (Rom 5.1). The Gospel for Paul does not merely build trust. It destroys the rebellion of unbelief. It is for this reason that coming to faith is frequently presented as God's work and not merely a human response.Footnote ⁴⁷

Finally, the value of Morgan's reminder of the significance of faithfulness for human social relations and human flourishing is not to be underestimated, especially in our time. Nevertheless, in their paraenesis the New Testament writings assign priority above all else to ἀγάπη (and ἀγαπάω), not to πίστις.Footnote ⁴⁸ As significant as faithfulness is to human relations, the Law is said to be fulfilled or summed up in love. This is so, one might suggest, because while ‘faithfulness’ certainly serves to nurture community, it is not clear that it is said to form community. It operates, or at least tends to operate, within defined social relationships (marriage, family, household, village, ethnic group) in which mutual duties are fairly well understood. That means, however, that ‘faithfulness’ may bear the dark side of exclusivity, the rejection of strangers or foreigners, who do not find a place in the usual order of things. Although other linguistic factors have to be taken into account, it seems significant that in the crucial texts, ‘love’ is represented by the ἀγαπάω word group and not the φιλέω word group, which tends to signify the (closed) bonds of friendship. Love is love of the other (Rom 13.8). The wigwam (or tipi) of trust that Morgan offers may signify a closed circle.Footnote ⁴⁹ Furthermore, most of the social relationships where πίστις and fides were expected were hierarchical. Then as well as now, this expectation of faithfulness or loyalty was subject to abuse. There are times and places in which the demand for faithfulness must be met with the greeting of Goethe's Götz. Yet even here, ἀγάπη, which transcends both πίστις and ἐλπίς, is to be present.