This Stevenson book is a must read for all who are dissatisfied/frustrated/fearful with/about their church and personal lives.
TylerWigg Stevenson, Brand Jesus; Christianity in a Consumerist Age, (NYC, Seabury Books, 2006), 122-130.
Chapter 15
The Righteous Shall Live By . . .
The final and perhaps most fundamental reason why Brand Jesus is allowed to thrive in the American church is because we have profoundly misinterpreted the meaning of "faith." Faith is and should be the core of Christianity. In today's popular Christian parlance, however, faith is frequently nothing more than a synonym for belief. And belief is as easy to define as it is to have. That is, belief consists of internal convictions about God. In many churches, the bare minimum of belief is the conviction that because we know Jesus as our personal savior, recognizing that he died for our sins, we arc going to heaven when we die.
Faith, by contrast, is considerably more challenging to define and to have. In feet, you can't hove faith. You live it. But our everyday understanding of faith as belief has drained any quality of action from the idea of faith. We speak of faith as if it were a noun to be possessed, rather than a verb to be enacted. So—how should we think of faith?
Outside of church, we use the word most frequently when talking about marriage. And, as it turns out, the way we use faith in that context can teach us a great deal about how we ought to use it in church. Everybody knows that keeping faith in a marriage is about fidelity or faithfulness over the long haul.
In other words, faith takes time in a way that belief doesn't. Imagining that belief is sufficient for Christian living is as absurd as imagining that a good wedding day will ensure a happy marriage. The bride and groom may believe their wedding vows with all their hearts and speak them clearly with their lips, but their convictions on the wedding day are only the beginning—not the end—of the story of their marriage.
From the wedding onwards, faith will be the day in, day out enactment of the couple's relationship. And a faithful marriage is one in which both spouses actively live out their wedding vows, in ways large and small, throughout their years together. The wedding day only asks that we believe. But vows are easy to say and celebrate. The faithfulness of marriage, with its having and holding, loving and cherishing, sickness and health, and riches and poverty, is hard. So, too, goes our Christian faith. But the way that we commonly read scripture has distorted our understanding, leaving us with the profoundly unbiblical idea that faith is no more than belief.
Let's look at one of the most important biblical passages about faith, the thesis of Paul's letter to the Romans in 1:16-17. Translations invariably make as neat a package of this passage as they can, though the Greek is distinctly difficult to pin down, especially in terms of what is usually translated as "faith.”
Observe below two reputable translations. In each of them, I have italicized the English rendering of the Greek pisieuonti. Notice how in each that the gospel is the "power of God for salvation" to the person who has something—the possessor of a spiritual commodity:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel; ft is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, 'The one who is righteous will live by faith." (NRSV)
I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile, For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last [or: that is from faith to faith], just as it is written: "The righteous
will live by faith." (NIV)
In many standard evangelistic presentations, these verses are read alongside the great promise of Romans 10:9, which pledges salvation to the one who verbally confesses Christ's Lordship and internally believes that God raised him from the dead. This combined reading produces an exhortation to a singular moment of belief, usually marked by something like the Sinner's Prayer. After that, the conventional wisdom goes, if the person meant it, he or she is saved. In other words, Paul is understood to be describing the work of an instant.
If Romans 1:16 is read in this way, then the reader is already predisposed to interpret "faith" as a possession when she reads Paul's quotation from the prophet Habakkuk in the next verse: "The righteous will live by faith." And because this verse from Habakkuk is the climax of Paul's thesis in 1:16-17, the reader is then left with an understanding that faith is something that she is supposed to have, rather than do. If we read Romans like this, we can come away with the idea that being a Christian is fundamentally about what one believes in heart and mind.
James wrote scathingly about such "faith": "Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do. You believe that there is one pod. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder?' (2:18-19, italics mine). In the false understanding of faith, one's Christianity can (in theory, at least) be an entirely internal and private matter, never requiring a connection to a church or any outward change in life. If Christianity simply requires belief, then Christ is technically no more significant than Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or any other object of belief.
Many churches will put every emphasis on your conversion and the belief—the coming to a conviction about Jesus as savior—obtained in that moment. This belief is your possession, effective for salvation whether you act on it or not. And the only way you can give up that belief is to replace it with some other belief. Such a reading makes for easy conclusions to evangelistic tracts.
The problem, of course, is that a reading of Romans 10:9 that understands it to mean the work of an instant is a reading that ignores the rest of the New Testament context. Coming to faith is actually about joining the family of God, the body of Christ, and living out this new relationship faithfully. The biblical understanding of faith bears no resemblance to the quick belief that we so often sell. No, in the biblical understanding of faith, the righteous one will live by fidelity, or even trusting obedience.
To be sure, faith as fidelity or trusting obedience incorporates and even begins with belief, just as a marriage begins and often finds its inspiration from a wedding. One cannot be faithful to that which one does not first believe. Thus, the connotation of belief is clearly present in the classic definition of faith of Hebrews 11:1—it is "being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." But, as Hebrews 11 goes on to describe, the faith for which "the ancients were commended" is an obedience over the long haul, not a spiritual possession that they acquired once and for all.
The way we use belief is not the way the Bible uses it. In the biblical usage, belief is what we would call faith, endurance based on a confidence in the final righteousness of God, regardless of one's present circumstances. Take Hebrews 10:39 as an example: "We are not of those who shirk back and are destroyed, but of those who believe and are saved." Faith, in other words, is lived in and over time. It is not something to hoard, but something to do—or, to be more precise, it is a way of living life.
This understanding of a way of life is consistent with the New Testament portrayal of conversion. Someone coming to faith in the biblical context was one who began to follow the way of the disciple—with all its stumbling and missteps (Mark 10:52). The book of Acts even refers to the early church as "the Way" (Acts 9:2; 19:9). And this in turn resonates with the message of the Old Testament prophets, who called the people to "ask where the good way is, and walk in it," and so "find rest for your souls" (Jeremiah 6:16). Contrast this with the life style offered by Brand Jesus. It is a belief to be worn, showed off, even posed in. But it is not the way of life that is biblical faith.
Biblical faith is the way in which God instructs the prophet Habakkuk: not only belief, but rather an active, lived trust in the sovereignty and final judgment of God. Habakkuk—one of the most honest figures in the Bible—cries out to God with a Job-like complaint: Why does wickedness prevail? God's answer does not offer immediate satisfaction, to say the least:
... the revelation awaits an appointed time, it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay. See, [the wicked one] is puffed up; his desires are not upright—but the righteous will live by his faith.... (2:3-4)Interestingly, the comment on the faith of the righteous is merely an interjection in the middle of a longer judgment against the wicked. Both Habakkuk and the wicked one perceive the same situation—that evil goes unpunished for now, and that violence and greed run unchecked for the gain of the few. The wicked one is "arrogant and never at rest... greedy as the grave," God tells Habakkuk. But whereas the wicked one sees the situation and exploits it, Habakkuk cries out to God for relief. God's answer to Habakkuk—that God will be faithful to God's own character, which promises justice—points out the flaw in the perception of the wicked, who acts as if the present is all there is, with no judgment to come.
By contrast, the righteous one will live in the continual, present expectation of the future judgment of God— that is, in fidelity or trusting obedience to the dependability of God. Thus, the "by faith" of the righteous seems to refer both to God and humankind. The faith of people finds its home in the faithfulness of God. God is faithful. The Lord has not abandoned the world, the wicked do not build to their own lasting glory, and the righteous do not suffer without the sure knowledge of a final vindication. This emphasis on faithfulness is especially helpful in our present context, when it is difficult even to hear the word "faith" without simply thinking "belief”—given that the saying "have faith in Christ" usually means "believe such-and-such about Christ."
According to Habakkuk, the righteous one's life has everything to do with waiting for God with trust. This understanding of faith is beautifully expanded by the illustration in the final verses of his concluding hymn of praise:
Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The sovereign LORD is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to go on the heights. (3:17-19)It is not the case that Habakkuk sings his hymn because all is well with the world. He is not deluded about the quality of his present circumstance. Neither is it true that Habakkuk simply believes a set . of propositions about God. No, faith is the way Habakkuk lives. He enacts the faith of the righteous by rejoicing in the Lord and being joyful in God his Savior. He does not trust in his own strength (such trust being the imperative to Mammon's devotees) but relies upon the steadfastness of the Lord.
Taking the original meaning of faith in Habakkuk and applying it to our Romans text leads us to a very different interpretation than that of the status quo as described above. Notice that Paul's "from faith to faith" makes explicit the dual implication of Habakkuk's faith, which leaves faith as a shared action between God and humankind. Faith is the double-sided character of the divine-human relationship. We believe that God is believe-able, trust that God is trust-worthy, and have faith that God is faith-ful. An expanded paraphrase of Romans 1:16-17 along these lines might read as follows:
For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who trustingly obeys [God], to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed by [God's] faithfulness to the faith [of those who trust him], just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith/fulness."
In summary, faith is something we are to live, rather than something we can have.
Let me say for the record, in anticipation of the inevitable criticism, that I am not advocating works righteousness. I hold to the traditional Protestant assertion of justification by faith alone. However, I am arguing that, while the formulation of "faith alone" is correct, in such contexts we often proclaim an emaciated "faith." Faith alone—always. But belief alone—never. The righteous one does not live by belief.
But if faith is something we do, then am I not making it a work? Am I not somehow saying we can earn our way into heaven? (The assumption that the question of heaven ought to be primary for the Christian is itself dangerous—see above.) The answer is "no."
To begin with, we have to remember that, during the Reformation, our Protestant forebears drew a stark line between faith and works in part because of the ecclesial situation they found themselves in protest against. We have inherited their (justifiable) hostility toward labeling specific works, like indulgences, as the effective work of faith. But the fear of backsliding on this issue has led many of us to shirk any connection whatsoever between faith and action.
Such a distinction is unbiblical, however, since James himself connects the two when he contends that belief, if it is something possessed but not enacted as faith, is not salvific (2:14). The fundamental truth of the Reformers was that good deeds neither constitute nor prove a saving faith. With them, we affirm that no one can work his or her way into God's favor. But though deeds cannot prove the positive presence of faith, their absence can and does prove the negative: A life without deeds is a life without faith. "By their fruits you will know them" (Matthew 7:20). Belief that is an internal quality—an assertion or conviction regarding a set of principles or propositions—is therefore an unbiblical faith. This is bad enough on its own, but in our age, the understanding of faith as possession of belief has resulted in the rise of an idol, Brand Jesus, a commodified Christianity.
So how can we understand an enacted faith without making it a "work"? Our trouble comes out of an inability to think past the presuppositions that accompany the compartmentalized life (spirituality/faniily/job/ finance/politics/etc.), which is so hospitable to Brand Jesus. This fact is yet another indicator of how deep our problem is as a church. It is not true that the church body is healthy overall, with the exception of some doctrinal error called Brand Jesus, which we can excise as easily as an isolated tumor. Our problem is rather that the very way we live makes such a fertile soil for the false gospel of Brand Jesus.
To paraphrase Pete Rollins, our problem is not so much that we believe the wrong things, but that we believe the wrong way. [1 Peter Rollins, How (Not) to Speak of God, (London, SPCK, 2006), 2-3.] We think of our lives in much the same way as we do belief; in other words, as something we have. And, in having life, we take actions—works— in the various spheres or compartments of our lives. In this manner of thinking, it is entirely possible to fall into the error of attempting spiritual works to gain the grace of God.
This course of action is based, however, on a false view of life.
Life is not truly a possession because it cannot be hoarded. It must be lived. So, too, faith— which is no more contained in the moment of coming to belief than a marriage is contained in the video of the wedding day. Those events, frozen in a DVD and a hundred photographs, can be possessed. But the faith of the marriage, like the Christian faith, cannot be.
Life and faith, in other words, are enacted without being "works." To get to this understanding, we have to extract belief and faith from the compartments in which we have stuffed them. They are too big and too complex to fit there. Faith enacted is not a work; it is the basis for all works. Faith is not an action, but it is unrecognizable if not through one's actions.
Put grammatically, faith is an adverb. It is life lived trustingly. Faith takes the life that everyone possesses—good and evil alike—and commits it to the inbreaking dominion and final providence of the Lord Jesus Christ and the God who raised him from the dead. Faith is therefore enacted, but it is not an action in the way that obedience to the law is an action.
Recall the first of the parables that Christ told to the chief priests and elders in the Temple courts (Matthew 21:28-32). There was a man with two sons who told them each to go work in the vineyard. One refused, but later repented and went; the other assented, but did not go. Which did the father's will, Christ asks? And the religious leaders condemn themselves, correctly identifying as righteous the one whose repentance led to action, though they were more like the one who agreed and did nothing. Charles Spurgeon, preaching on this text, assailed the "deceptively submissive" in his congregation as latter-day examples of the religious leaders:
You utter a polite, respectful "I go, sir," but you do not go. You give a notional assent to the gospel. If I were to mention any doctrine, you would say, "Yes, that is true. I believe that." But your heart does not believe: you do not believe the gospel in the core of your nature, for if you did, it would have an effect upon you. A man may say, "I believe my house is on fire," but if he goes to bed and falls to sleep, it does not look as if he believed it, for when a man's house is on fire he tries to escape. [Charles Spurgeon, Sermon 742: "A Sermon to Open Neglecters and Nominal Followers of Religion," in Spurgeon's Sermons, Vol 13, www-ccei.org (accessed 27Sep06)]
Those whom Spurgeon addressed, like many today, had an un-enacted belief, a propositional possession that was like a jewel in a safe, beautiful in shape, but worthless for the fact of its being locked away. They were, as Spurgeon quipped, as religious as the seats they sat in, and as likely to get into heaven.
"Notional assent"—in modern parlance, belief as commodity—is not faith. Because the correctness of one's belief is not simply its content but how one carries it, a belief that is doctrinally correct but merely internal is not a correct belief. Internal belief that remains internal is faithless. Many cry, "Lord, Lord," but the only true belief is the one that is lived out in accord with the will of the Father who is in heaven (Matthew 7:21-23).
I realize that the above account will not satisfy some whose primary concern is avoiding works righteousness. It seems to me, however, that our desire for clean and simple answers can lead us astray. A paranoia about works righteousness that leads us to conceive of faith as merely one of faith's components—belief, and that simply as propositional assent—imposes an unbiblical sterility on the complexity of the actual biblical witness.
We may not resolve for our leisure what the Bible leaves as a challenge. The narrow way is surrounded on both sides by unavoidable slippery slopes. And discipleship, like it or not, is the hard task of avoiding a fall in either direction. There is certainly the danger that talking about faith in action will lead to the errors of works righteousness. But divorcing faith from action has led to the error of desiccated belief. And we were never promised an easy road. Jesus did not tell us that two thousand years into the game someone would come up with a foolproof, ten-point church strategy that would suddenly make it easy to follow him. Christians are supposed to stay awake, so it is counterproductive to weave the doctrinal equivalent of a hammock on a sunny afternoon. Faith as belief, a possession to be had—who wouldn't be ready to put his or her feet up and relax on that?
Given our comparison with weddings and marriages, American Christians' overemphasis on belief is perhaps unsurprising. After all, the wedding industry has become a huge business in the United States. We subscribe so readily to the fantasy of that single, perfect, "magic" day; entire magazines are dedicated to perpetuating this myth, and our infatuation with reality television shows about weddings ("Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?") demonstrates that we fall for it completely. The average expense of weddings continues to rise. Yet so do divorce rates. Is it any coincidence that our iniatuation with the magic of a single day corresponds to an inability to consider the span of a lifetime? And can the church therefore be surprised when so many take the plunge of making their baptismal vows to Christ but are unwilling to live them out over the long years of faith?
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