Paul: A Biography

by N.T. Wright

But the point of Jesus’s rescuing death, which Jesus himself had seen as the new Passover, was that the powerful “gods” and “lords” to which humans had given away their own proper authority had been defeated. The resurrection proved it and had thereby launched a new world and a new people to reflect the true God into that new world. That is why Paul’s Gentile mission was not a different idea from the idea of “forgiveness of sins” or the “cleansing of the heart.” It was because the powerful gospel announced and effected those realities that the old barriers between Jew and Greek were abolished in the Messiah. It was because in the Messiah the promises of Psalm 2 had come true—that God would set his anointed king over the rulers of the nations, thus extending into every corner of the world the promises made to Abraham about his “inheritance”—that Paul could summon people of every kind of background to “believing obedience.”

And since he could not in fact be in more places than one and could not write nearly as much, even in his longest letters, as he would ideally have liked (we think again of that long, hot night in Troas and of Eutychus falling out of the window), he realized early on that it was his job not just to teach people what to think and believe, but to teach them how.

How to think with “the Messiah’s mind,” especially as it was shaped around the story of the cross: “This is how you should think among yourselves—with the mind that you have because you belong to the Messiah, Jesus.”

This, I submit, is part of the reason for the remarkable success of his work.

Isaiah’s vision of the servant who would bring God’s light to the Gentiles and of the troubles that this servant would have to undergo—including doubt about whether his work was actually doing any good at all—was Paul’s constant companion. This was one of the things that made him tick.

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 they were Gentiles, such people had been “justified,” declared to be in the right, to be within God’s covenant family, by God’s overthrow of the enslaving powers, by his forgiveness of sins, and by the powerful cleansing work of the spirit.

The point was that one could then recognize members of the family by their pistis, which could be expressed as “believing in the God who raised Jesus from the dead” or confessing Jesus as Lord and believing that God raised him from the dead. Titus shared that pistis; that is why Paul and Barnabas insisted that he should not be circumcised. The Gentile believers in Antioch shared that pistis; that is why Paul confronted Peter when by his behavior he seemed to suggest otherwise. And so on.

But “assent” is only ever one part of it. The gospel does not merely produce a mental reaction, a calculation and a conclusion. That matters but it never happens alone, and perhaps only a certain type of late medieval philosopher could imagine that it might. Mind and heart are inextricably linked. And that is why “loyalty” is also a vital part of pistis. “Believing obedience”—the obedience of faith, in more common translations—is the full-hearted, full-person response of loyalty to the message about Jesus. A contested loyalty, of course, but loyalty nonetheless.