Pistis Christou

In recounting the trends of Protestant Biblical Scholarship as it pertains to Christology, N.T. Wright makes the following observation regarding trends in trying to reconstruct what the true faith really is:

The second tendency has often been in tension with the first, but still exercises a powerful influence. Protestantism appealed over the head of later ecclesial developments to the fountain-head: to the Bible and the Fathers, against the medieval church. If one went back to the beginning, one would strip off folly and rediscover faith. With the Enlightenment, the ‘bad period’ was quietly extended: now, everything between the Bible and the Enlightenment itself was under judgment, and the Bible itself was picked apart for signs of a genuine early religion, whether that of Jesus himself or at least that of Paul. At the same time, Romanticism constantly implied that the ‘primitive’ form of any movement was the genuine, inspired article, the original vision which would fade over time as people moved from charisma to committees, from adoration to administration, from spontaneous and subversive spirituality to stable structures and a salaried sacerdotalism. ¹

Latent within Protestantism was this constant reform movement built within it. This occasionally lead to the emergence of more radical reform movements that tried to reproduce the original faith, such as the Anabaptists, the Pietists, the Stone-Campbell movement, etc., but each of these radical movements didn’t have a real sustaining power in religious discourse, but they either tended to fade away (Anabaptists), their principles integrated into other religious movements (such as Pietism into early Methodism), or stabilize into some establish church on the periphery of mainstream (Stone-Campbell into the Churches of Christ). Rarely do such radical reform movements establish any type of sustaining power.

But then for the trends that N.T. Wright mentions, we might label these as led radical reform tendencies, which are baked more so into the mainstream culture. As much of Protestantism tried to maintain some continuity with its tradition, it sought the true understanding of faith over and against the Catholic stranglehold. This got passed onto the Enlightenment, switch from the faith itself to search for a religion of reason. Romanticism in protest of many of the trends of the Enlightenment sought for the true religion of authentic experience. Projecting into the future, I would say we see the same trends in religion in the more recent era, with liberalism trying to fine the true religion of universal humanity, contemporary progressivism trying to find the true religion of love, fundamentalism the true religion of doctrine, and evangelicals the true religion of sin-avoidance.

What all these movements share (sans perhaps liberalism, which tended to be more mainstream in modernity over and against the fundamentalist protest of modernity) however, is a deep suspicion of religious hierarchy. Protestants, the Enlightenment, and the Romantics all share a deep suspicion of priests and religious structure. Similarly in the modern era, Fundamentalists think the church leaders hiding the true doctrines of the church, evangelicals see sin being permitted and allowed to reign by the religious leaders, and progressives see hatred being peddled by religion. So the thinking goes that the reason the Gospel/true religion is veiled from the people is that the religious hierarchy are the true source of the problem. So, if we just clean up the leadership, if we just clean up the structure, if we just clean up the processes, we will be able to find and practice what the true religion really is.

No doubt, this was baked into Western Christianity once Jewish religious leadership of the Pharisees we taken as being proto-Catholics by the Protestant Reformation. The Pharisees became all the problem and were the ultimate source of all the problems that were faced. They stood in the way of the true religion of Jesus, who is so commonly taken as authorizing whatever we think true religion ahead of time is, so they are the source of the problem.

And yes, the Pharisees and scribes are seen as Jesus’ main, though not only, enemies. They bear a large responsibility in the circumstances that lead to his crucifixion. They are characterized in ways that we might today call petty, narcissistic, hypocritical, angry, oblivious, etc. There is no denying they were a terrible enemy that Jesus had to face. 

But herein lies the problem: if we are to take Jesus’ teachings and life seriously, if we are to take the rest of the New Testament witnesses at their word, then the reason the true religion is hindered isn’t because of our enemies, and thus it isn’t because of some religious hierarchy in and of themselves. The Pharisees are not the Nazis of Christian faith.

Jesus wasn’t out to take the names of his Pharisee enemies down and beat them down one by one. In John 3, Jesus meets with the Pharisee Nicodemus, who was bit oblivious at the time during the whole discussion of a new birth, but was gradually brought forward to being on Jesus’s side. In Matthew 13:52, Jesus provides a place for scribes in the kingdom of God, where they can provide treasures from both the Jewish scriptures (“old treasures”) and the emerging kingdom (“new treasures”). The problem wasn’t itself the religiosity. The Apostle Paul, who had many a conflict with many opponents throughout his apostolic tenure, says later on in his life in Ephesians 6:12: “”For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Meanwhile, in talking about the Jews who opposed the Gospel of Christ and opposed Paul, he finds in Romans 10:1-2 that firstly, he desires their salvation and can commend them for their zeal, while recognizing there is a distinct problem of the knowledge that informs their zeal. If we take all of this seriously, then, the problem for Jesus and then later Paul isn’t human enemies, even in the forms of religious leadership.

If we think seriously, the problematic aspects of religion are more symptoms than they are the true causes of the problems. It would probably be more accurate to suggest that religious hierarchy manifests the problems rather than causes them; I would suggest a similar reality for political leadership. Outside of the few instances where those with authority have forcibly instituted their will upon people apart from any consent, most leadership arises because they reflect in some way the values of those they lead. But this wasn’t the Pharisees, their authority rested more in popularity than in fiat power. Then, once they get authority, some can use their power in self-serving ways, but there can even be punitive ‘saints’ who do nothing but what they have been called to do and they can cause problems also. In other words, religious leadership (and other leadership) can be a source of problems themselves, but the reason they are problems isn’t generally themselves, but there is something deeper; something cultural; something more insidious and pervasive; something that Paul can only really refer to by talking about spiritual forces of darkness.

But if we read Paul carefully, he never rails into a littany of the powers of the devil, as if the solution is to fight off demons, but his main explanation roots around one basic, human reality: the flesh. The flesh isn’t code for sinful nature; nor is it a reference to the fact of bodily existence; nor is it a reference to life when used by itself, as it is when used in the phrase “flesh and blood.” Rather, the flesh is a reference to our present form of embodiment in the world absent the full transformative work of Christ and the Spirit. There is a weakness to the flesh that outright blocks people’s ability to please God. Similarly, Jesus, speaking to his sleepy disciples while he was praying in the Garden of Gethsamene said similarily, “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” which perhaps echoes the experiences of his own wilderness and temptation experience that came before Jesus’ ministry fully began.

This is the power that is present among all of us as humans; none of us are free from its presence. From this, we can say, all the other problems emerge or take advantage of, including the evil spiritual powers, including the religious hierarchy, etc. We can include with this also our modern discourse of the systemic and cultural sins that we see so present in our society; we can include the political zealotry that shoots first and often and fails to ever ask questions. Moving away from personal evils, we may even include a host of impersonal evils that is not anyone’s fault, such as mental illness, physical disease and illness, etc. We can include a whole host other problems, sin, brokenness, and injustices that ultimately stem from our present embodied life absent the full transformative work of Christ and the Spirit.

The solution to this for Paul was to behold the power of God through the narrative traditions of Jesus’ own life, crucifixion, resurrection, and glorification paired with the powerful works, revelation, and discernment of the Spirit that comes. In this, the veil of the present age is pulled back, sometimes for just a brief glimpse that can not be readily understood, and one begins to see the glory of God in Christ that the Spirit makes known. It is here that reign of sin and death as forces inhabiting the flesh are pushed back, their strongholds successfully sieged, their battle lines broken.

Religious hierarchy can fight this, but they are not really the ultimate problems nor are they the enemies. Rather, the real struggle and the source that stymies the true faith is the very human reality we all share; the very human reality of weakness that God is seeking to make into new creation. Hence, the powerful moves of God doesn’t occur by winning battles against human authority, but rather in rediscovery of the work that God has been doing and continues to do, even if the veil has long covered our eyes from seeing it until we in our rightly directed faith turn to the Lord of glory. And what we find isn’t some set of principles or rules that make true religion, as true religion isn’t something immediate useful for simply our present conflicts and concerns that most reform movements are inspired by, but rather a relationship to God that is defined by πίστις/faith, which we can refer to as a trusting attachment and attitude towards God that then impacts the whole of what we expect from God and seek ourselves.

The Protestant Reformation, in seeking to be justified by faith brought forth something very important from the New Testament witnesses. At the same time, they didn’t really understand what the significance of faith in the New Testament was, using it more as a contrast with religious practice, structure, and hierarchy. As a consequence, the concerns of religion became more concerned by the conflicts latent with the social and political principles of whatever the present age was, and thus the search for true religion always had the face of society as its end result which it projected back onto God in a Feuerbachian sort of way. But, for Paul and the New Testament, faith was in contrast to the normal human mode of life that we all exist within apart from God’s own self-disclosure and our acceptance of it. This is why Christ was without sin to the point of the crucifixion and was then raised from the dead: to demonstrate God’s power over sin and death that inhabits the flesh. So, to have faith in the God who makes Himself known in Christ and the Spirit is to cease to be indomitability ruled by this flesh.

1. Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Two book set (Christian Origins and the Question of God) (Kindle Locations 17651-17658). Fortress Press. Kindle Edition.