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The Metamorphoses of Faith
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
The great paradigm of faith in Christian literature from Paul's Epistle to the Romans to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, has been the faith of Abraham. The story of Abraham, the story of a patriarch who trusted against all odds in a divine promise of posterity, has lent itself to this by its very simplicity. To Paul, converted from Pharisaism to Christianity, Abraham was the model of the man who finds righteousness through faith in God's promise rather than through observance of God's law. To Kierkegaard, coming after Kant's ethical interpretation of Christianity, Abraham was the model of the religious man as distinct from the ethical man. There is no doubt a parallel between Kierkegaard's religious man and Paul's man who finds righteousness through faith in God's promise. There is, moreover, a real parallel between both of these and Abraham. Yet there is also a difference all along the line. The difference becomes particularly apparent when Abraham's alternative is considered. The alternative was not to be an ethical man nor even to find righteousness through observance of God's law. It was to rely upon his own devices to secure the posterity which he so desired, to take the normal human precautions, to raise the son of his concubine, to refuse to offer his son in sacrifice.
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References
1 For this notion of myth and this formulation of the problem of death cf. my book The City of the Gods (New York, 1965), v ff. and 217 ff.Google Scholar
2 Galatians 3:16.
3 Philippians 2:9–11. That Kyrios as applied to Jesus in the New Testament is derived from the Septuagint is a disputed point. Bultmann, for instance, has it that this is “highly improbable,” but he admits that the title did make it possible to transfer to Jesus utterances about Yahweh in the Septuagint. Cf. his Theology of the New Testament, tr. by Grobel, Kendrick, vol. I (London, 1952), p. 124f.Google Scholar
4 Romans 8:15.
5 Galatians 4:6.
6 Exodus 6:3.
7 Deuteronomy 26:5–10.
8 Deuteronomy 26:3.
9 Cf. Bultmann, , Primitive Christianity in Its Contemporary Setting tr. by Fuller, R. H. (New York, 1957), p. 80 ff.Google Scholar
10 Matthew 3:2.
11 On the relationship between the life of Jesus and that of John the Baptist cf. my article “The Human God: Jesus” in Commonweal, vol. LXXXV, no. 18 (02 10, 1967), p. 508 ff.Google Scholar
12 On the paramount significance of this name Abba in the preaching of Jesus cf. Jeremias, Joachim, The Central Message of the New Testament (New York 1965).Google Scholar
13 Cf. Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, (London 1911)Google Scholar and Robinson, James M., The Quest of the Historical Jesus, (London 1959).Google Scholar Cf. also my article referred to in note 11.
14 I Conrinthians 12:3.
15 I John 4:2.
16 Philippians 2:9.
17 On Paul's past as a Pharisee cf. Philippians 3:5 and Acts 23:6 and 26:5. On the Pharisees believing in the resurrection of the dead as against the Sadducees cf. Acts 23:7 f.
18 Romans 1:16 f.
19 For Luther's basic formulation of the problem of faith in terms of law and gospel cf. his preface to Paul';s Epistle to the Romans in Dillenberger, John(ed.), Martin Luther (New York, 1961), p. 19 ff.Google Scholar This preface became the occasion of John Wesley's conversion experience two centuries later. Cf. Outler, A.C. (ed.), John Wesley (New York, 1964), p. 66.Google Scholar
20 Augustine set forth his thesis that faith is a gift in his treatise On the Predestination of the Saints written towards the end of his life (in 429) in his controversy with the Semipelagians. The importance of predestination in Calvinism and of God's sovereignty in the bestowal of grace is directly related to this basic idea that faith is a gift given to whomsoever God chooses. Cf. the citations of this treatise of Augustine's in Calvin's Institutes, II, 2, 9; 3, 10; 4, 4; 17, 1; III, 1, 4; 15, 2; 22, 1 and 8; 24, 1.
21 Augustine tells in the Confessions how he could not get beyond spatial images of spiritual substance when he was a Manichee (IV, 15 and VII, 1), how he learned from the Platonists (the Neoplatonists) to transcend these images and to conceive of the soul, the Logos, and God (VII, 9 ff.), but how he learned only from the Scriptures that the Logos had become flesh (ibid.) At each stage the problem of thinking about substance is central.
22 The dualism of what man can be by nature and what he can be by participation is especially prominent in Augustine's letter On the Grace of the New Testament(Epistle 140). “St. Thomas' Theology of Participation” in Theological Studies, vol. XVIII (1957), p. 487 ff.Google Scholar fot the role which this perspective of Augustine's was to play in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The dualism of nature and grace is prominent in most of Augustine's Antipelagian writings, particularly the one with that title, On Nature and Grace.
23 The corruption of man's nature is a central theme of the Antipelagian works, the consubstantiality a central theme of his treatise On the Trinity, and the mediatorship sparsely mentioned in Scripture (I Timothy 2:5; Hebrews 8:6, 9:15, 12:24) becomes a central theme of Augustine's major works, probably in opposition to Neoplatonic ideas on mediation (cf. The City of God, VIII and IX).
24 Cf. my book, The City of the Gods, p. 141ff.Google Scholar A further treatment of the pattern of the life story with particular reference to Paul, Augustine, and Kierkegaard will appear in Part Two of a book which I am now preparing (to be published by Macmillan).
25 The terms “grace” and “nature” are both used in Paul's epistles but they are not the alternatives of a dualism. There is a dualism of “grace” and “wrath” and one of “according to nature” and “against nature.” The closest Paul comes to the dualism of nature and grace is perhaps the phrase in Ephesians 2:3 “by nature children of wrath.”
Augustine, thinking in terms of the dualism of grace and nature, came up against problems with Paul's dualism of faith and works. Is faith itself something man can attain by nature? In the end, in his treatise On the Predestination of the Saints, p. 7 f., and in his Retractations, I, 23, he took back what he had said earlier in his life, commenting on Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and affirmed that faith itself was a gift of God's grace.
26 In The City of the Gods, p.184 ff.Google Scholar, I have described the modern myth as a myth of autonomy. The formulation in this article is equivalent in that self-appropriation is conceived as the process of going from alienation to autonomy.
27 The Sickness unto Death, tr. by Lowrie, Walter (under the same cover with Fear and Trembling) (New York, 1954), p. 147 and p. 262.Google Scholar
28 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. by Swenson, D. F. and Lowrie, Walter, (Princeton, 1941), p. 540.Google Scholar On faith as a “leap” cf. ibid., p. 86 ff. On the “absolute paradox” cf. his Philosophical Fragments (written under the same pseudonym Climacus), tr. by Swenson, D. F. (Princeton, 1962), p. 46 ff.Google Scholar
29 I Corinthians 1:18.
30 On the Flesh of Christ, 5.
31 Hebrews 11:1.