it loved to happen

Belief

[excerpted from pp. 258-264 of Jesus and the Victory of God, by N. T. Wright]

Like ‘repentance’, ‘belief’ has come to carry a good many overtones of religious experience and dogma.  Theologians have discussed the meaning of ‘faith’, or ‘belief’, and have located it on a scale somewhere between the English concepts of ‘trust’ and ‘assent’, sometimes using the Latin tags fides qua (the faith with which one believes) and fides quae (the faith which one believes) to distinguish the two.

… When all other boundary-markers disappear in the great moment of judgment, the people of YHWH will be marked out by their faith:

Look at the proud!  Their spirit is not right in them; but the righteous live by their faith. [footnote reads: Hab. 2.4.  According to bMakk. 24a, this verse sums up the whole of divine revelation. …]

‘Faith’, as far as these texts [are] concerned, is not simply to be understood as a single, miscellaneous religious quality, ‘virtue’, or attribute.  It is the distinguishing mark of the true people of YHWH at the time of crisis. It is one of the things, predictably, that will characterize the return from exile:

Behold, I shall restore to her soundness and health, and I shall cause them to hearken; and I shall heal her, and create for them peace and faith. [Jer. 40.6 (LXX).]

… ‘Faith’ is thus not simply to be understood, within the world of first-century Judaism, in terms simply of religious interiority. … What matters is that faith is a crucial part of the definition of Israel at her time of great crisis. Jesus’ call for ‘faith’ was not merely the offering of a new religious option or dimension.  It was a crucial element in the eschatological reconstitution of Israel around himself.

… The ‘faith’ which is the concomitant of so many acts of healing is not simply ‘believing that Israel’s god can do this’.  It is believing that Israel’s god is acting climactically in the career of Jesus himself.

… ‘Faith’, as Jesus invited people to it, carried two particular overtones, one (in the anachronistic division of our own times) more obviously ‘religious’ and the other more apparently ‘secular’.  The ‘religious’ meaning, stressed at various points in the gospels, focused on the insistence that Israel’s god was to be seen as the ‘father’ of his people. This, it must be emphasized, was not a new thought; it is found in the Old Testament and a fair amount of subsequent Jewish writings.  Nor is it simply a matter of ‘father’ being one miscellaneous appellation among many for YHWH.  Nor, yet, is it to be explained solely in terms of Jesus’ ‘religious experience’.  It is particularly associated, as the passages in the note indicate, with his great acts of deliverance, namely the exodus and the return from exile. To invoke this god as ‘father’ is to stir up associations of the great coming deliverance.  Jesus, in inviting his hearers to think of their god explicitly in this way, was emphasizing a strand in Jewish tradition which implicitly carried forward his claim: those who possessed this ‘faith’ in YHWH as ‘father’ were defining themselves as the eschatological Israel.  Parables which echo this whole theme include the two sons; gifts for the children; and of course, once again, the prodigal son (or the prodigal father).

‘Faith’ can also carry the more ‘secular’ meaning which we saw in the passage from Josephus’ Life quoted above.  Josephus asked Jesus the Galilean brigand leader ‘to repent and believe in me’, in other words, to give up his agenda and follow Josephus’ instead.  Jesus of Nazareth, I suggest, issued more or less exactly the same summons to his contemporaries.  They should give up their way of being the people of god and trust him for his. As with repentance, so with faith: Jesus’ call carried the implication that those who followed him, followed his way of being Israel, were the true Israel whom YHWH was calling into being as the real returned-from-exile ones.  The call to ‘believe in the gospel’, or to ‘believe in me’, does not suggest that Jesus was inviting Galilean villagers to embrace a body of doctrine - not even a basic ‘theory’ about ‘salvation’ and how they might attain it, nor, again, very much of a christology (though presumably it involved recognizing Jesus as a god-sent prophet like John).  Nor does it suggest that Jesus was offering them what we would today call a new ‘religious experience’.  It evokes the historical picture of one who believed that, with his work, Israel’s god was inaugurating his long-awaited kingdom.

[All emphases above are mine.  I note with this last portion that Jesus’ call during his ministry to ‘repent and believe’ does not even require listeners to affirm that Jesus is God incarnate in any direct sense, let alone that he is going to make atonement for their personal record of sin against God.  It’s also worth noting that “Jesus of Nazareth was not the only person who held that belief, and acted upon it, in the period.  His call to ‘believe’ him does not, by itself, make him ‘unique’. … The differences appear not least in the way of life to which he called his hearers.”  In other words, Jesus’ claim is different from others in its content (what it claims the arriving kingdom of God is like) and in the way that he substantiates it, bringing it into being by his words and verifying it by his actions.]