Pistis

Hallelujah.

What is the theme of this conference? Eh? Pistis.

What does it mean? Faith.

Faith [trumpet sounds].

That's the, the Greek word for faith.

It's not pistil.

Pistis.

[piano plays] Who said it's p- who said pistil? Ask your friend, who said pistil? Faith.

In the New Testament section, the Bible.

Pistis.

Means faith.

It means belief.

That knowing that God is going to come through.

That word faith in the Greek, it's pistis.

It means to be fully persuaded.

I'm fully persuaded that this chair could hold my weight.

It's more than mentally agreeing that something is true.

Pistis carries the idea of trust, confidence, and being fully persuaded.

So when you hear that word faith, you need to give it a deeper definition.

People will talk about their faith, meaning I'm a Christian, I'm a Catholic, I'm a whatever.

P-I-S-T-I-S. That's faith.

Pistis.

Praise God.

Hallelujah.

You see? So you see that they are from the same primary word.

Hallelujah.

Pistis, pistio is the same word.

Different tenses or different, what do you call it again in English? Praise God.

But before he was that, in 1970, he wrote an article in the Reformed Theological Review, The Faith of Jesus Christ, a New Testament Debate.

And at the time, most people, when they saw the Greek pistis Christi, they thought it was faith in Christ, even though the King James says the faith of Christ.

And And he kind of takes the line, it's like, well, why can't it be the other way of reading it? Why can't it be the faith of Christ? And he interprets faith as like fixity or firmness, and it's like Jesus is— firmness and faith or whatever kind of guides that.

And he kind of, I think someone cheekily will say, every reference to the faith of Christ in the New Testament can be read that way.

But in Galatians 2.20, we have the fairly unique the faith of or in the Son of God.

So let's go to the next one.

The debate over the pistis Christi, the faith of slash in debate, is usually characterized in terms of what does the genitive mean.

Now, there's like three aspects to this debate.

I would just like to mention, you know, a couple of years back, I published a long encyclopedia article in the St. Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology on Faith.

in which I got into these big issues about the new perspective and the controversy over Pistis Christo, the faith of Christ, whether it's an objective or a subjective, genitive, and so forth and so on.

And I would simply like to say that there is a certain kind of Lutheran stubbornness that because we've always translated it as an objective genitive, meaning faith in Christ, these people saying that it can be translated as a subjective genitive, the faith or faithfulness of Christ must be Reformed, Calvinists, or some other miscreants.

And I took them on because I think that I think that that's totally wrongheaded.

And if those are not separated from each other, then in the end you will have no choice but for faith to become the ultimate good work, and God is still holding out on you, trying to see if you will believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Yes, I think that if you simply try to reduce justification by faith to, like sometimes people say, this is Paul's practical Christology.

if you neglect the work of the Holy Spirit in the work of justifying faith, that comports with this resistance to translating Pistis Christo as faithfulness of Christ.

Why? Because the faithfulness of Christ is not self-evident.

Oligo, which means small.

Pistis, which means faith.

And he has this phrase that he says about people, "'O you of little faith.'" And when he says it and you first read it, you're like, that feels a little judgy, condescending, Jesus.

It feels like, oh my goodness, well, I'm doing my best out here, right? It's hard to not be divided all the time.