If pistis can mean “loyalty” as well as “faith,” might one express Paul’s most famous doctrine as “justification by loyalty”? That might be too much of a stretch, but for Paul “justification” itself meant something rather different from its normal Western meaning, framed as that has been by a moralistic vision (“Have I done all the things God wants me to do?”) linked to a platonic eschatology (“How can I go to heaven?”). For Paul, justification was about God’s declaration that this or that person was a member of the single family promised to Abraham—which meant that, though “ungodly” because
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