Our opponents regard faith as an easy thing, but I know from personal experience how hard it is to believe … All believers experience this difficulty. They would gladly embrace the Word with a full faith, but the flesh deters them. You see, our reason always thinks it is too easy and cheap to have righteousness, the Holy Spirit, and life everlasting by the mere hearing of the Gospel. (Martin Luther)

In the past forty years — following the publication of Richard B. Hays’ The Faith of Jesus Christ in 1983 — an enlightened consensus has emerged that pistis and its related words in the NT means faithfulness or even allegiance. Not — as it has been understood and translated throughout Christian history — “mere” faith. [1]

Faith as belief or trust has been moved to the markdown bin. For the bien-pensants of the post-evangelical intelligentsia, pistis as faith is as quaint as flip phones, or Mapquest printouts for road tripping. Announce to a room of scholars (or very earnest discipleship gurus) that you’re pretty much sold on pistis as faith, and they look at you like you’ve sprouted Ramen hair and take you about as seriously as a Geocities website.

In what follows, I don’t intend to convince any of them on this point. And considering blogs may be going the way of MTV-as-we-knew-it in our increasingly post-literate society, I am not at all optimistic that very many will even read this.

So why am I writing it then?

Well, I am a prisoner of hope. And I’m writing all that follows in braided hope of three strands.

• First, that those who need to read it will, by whatever strange providence it may come to them. I hope that, if nothing else, one day when the present faith-as-allegiance fever finally runs its course, perhaps some intrepid researcher might stumble across these scribblings via some Internet archive and be reminded that not every Christian was infected by this plague (or in my case, that some of us who did get it recovered eventually).
• Second, that by writing it down I may learn to better articulate it in conversations with the pistis-as-faithfulness / allegiance partisans. C.S. Lewis once told his friend Walter Hooper: “I don’t know what I mean til I see what I’ve said.” Thinking and writing are for me really a single process. Writing it all down helps me investigate, clarify, and refine my thoughts. In writing, my intuition is transformed into reasoning.
• Third — and this is most important to me — I hope to be able to express what is at stake both conceptually and experientially for Christian theology and life. Because systematics are embodied in practices. And I fear we have much to lose by revising what we mean by faith. (Or more precisely, what God meant by pistis.)

That being said, there are really three bold assertions I’d like to make here, and they all have one aim: Making sure the gospel is preserved as good news. Because the gospel is really all the Church has to offer the world, [2] but it’s really all the world needs, in an ultimate sense. And to devalue faith as belief or trust is really to diminish the gospel.

With that understanding, here are the three bold claims I shall make about why we must needs remove pistis-as-faith from the markdown pile.

• Faithfulness / allegiance is really not a good gloss for pistis-words in the NT.
• Redefining pistis-words as faithfulness / allegiance rather than faith / belief / trust actually clouds rather than clarifies the gospel.
• You can absolutely get robust and beautiful lives of action, obedience, and good works while standing firm on faith as belief / trust — which is really what seems to be at stake for the faithfulness / allegiance side. Indeed, I am unshakable in my conviction that you’ll get better results along these lines as long as you’re clear on the relationship between faith as belief / trust and good works — the latter being a good and necessary consequence of the former — than you can by trying to reframe pistis-words as faithfulness or allegiance.

Faithfulness / Allegiance aren’t good glosses for pistis words

I understand why many recent thinkers wish to translate pistis-words [3] as faithfulness or allegiance. Just as Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the last century rightly wanted to move away from “cheap grace,” what we’re seeing from the allegiance / faithfulness movement is a recoiling from degraded faith. [4] They want to recover the idea that faith in Jesus is not mere mental assent, but lived loyalty — an embodied trust in the risen Christ.

That instinct is surely right, but ideas like allegiance ultimately miss the mark. Allegiance shifts the center of pistis from dependence to duty, from a relational word to a political one.

Similarly, faithfulness seeks to shift our understanding of pistis away from a mere nodding of the head. But again, as with allegiance, faithfulness misses the mark because it’s shifting the image away from the vessel that receives God’s true and trustworthy grace (For by grace you have been saved through faith, Ephesians 2:8a ESV); to a behavior performed. The point of pistis is relational confidence, not moral consistency.

The key problem with glossing pistis-words with English terms like faithfulness and allegiance is that it transfers the emphasis from Christ or the Triune God as the object of faith; to the believer as the subject. Yet the grammar of the NT itself resists this shift. For example, in 1 Thessalonians 5:23-24, St. Paul prays:

Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.
‭‭ESV, emphasis added

Ultimately in Scripture it’s God’s faithfulness to the believer in Christ that’s central, not the believer’s faithfulness. The believer’s faith rests upon God’s faithfulness.

Meanwhile, let’s see how it plays out when we insert faithfulness or allegiance into actual Scriptures with pistis-words.

Mark 5:34

Here, Jesus says to the woman who’d been healed from her bleeding: Daughter, your faith has made you well (ESV). Would, your faithfulness has made you well, make sense here? She hadn’t displayed fidelity or loyalty. She simply reached out in desperate trust to touch the hem of His garment.

Mark 9:24

Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe [pisteúō]; help my unbelief! [apistía]” (ESV) [5]

Imagine if this man — who wanted our Lord to heal his son — had meant by this: I pledge allegiance; help my disloyalty! That simply would not make any sense.

Luke 7:50

Your faith has saved you; go in peace (ESV). This was to the sinful woman who poured out expensive perfume on him, and washed His feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. This was certainly an extravagant act of gratitude and devotion. But Jesus’ statement points to her trust in His mercy, not her track record of faithfulness.

John 3:16

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (ESV). Again, this passage turns awkward if reworded as, whoever is faithful to Him will not perish. The power of John 3:16 as gospel proclamation rests in its sheer receptivity! Whomever believes — whoever trusts! — will not perish. Not, whoever maintains a track record of steadfast devotion.

These passages stop making sense as soon as we reframe faith as faithfulness or allegiance precisely because faith is primarily a relational concept. And in terms of our salvation, faith names a particular type of relationship: faith receives grace upon grace and rests upon the fullness of God in Christ. Faith takes refuge in the Lord’s faithfulness towards us, not in ours to Him — for ours is ever weak, inconsistent, and shabby.

So faith trusts what our Lord says: I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand (John‬ ‭10‬:‭28‬ ‭ESV‬‬). We know that our weak faith lays hold on a strong Savior, and that even when we are too weak to hold onto Him, He clings firmly to us.

Scripture itself, then, stubbornly resists attempts to remake faith into allegiance or faithfulness. Faith in its time produces loyalty, obedience, and good works; but those — again — are products of faith, not faith itself. Faith is prior to its fruits, as the tree is prior to the apple. In the economy of NT grammar faith simply does not refer to ethical performance or political proclamation. It is resting in the comfort that we belong body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful Savior Jesus Christ, as it says in the old Heidelberg Catechism.

And if you mess with that, you end up making the gospel less than good news.

Indeed, we shall see in our next installment how the “gospel” our pistis-as-allegiance / faithfulness friends seek to offer may be good news for colonizing missionaries; but it is not at all certain how it would be received as good news by struggling, suffering sinners. [6]

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[1] I am not unaware of instances where pistis certainly means something akin to faithfulness; e.g., Titus 2:10: … to show that they can be fully trusted [literally to show all faithfulness; or to demonstrate good faith, Gk pistis] so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive (NIV 2011). Likewise, Romans 3:3: What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness [pistis] of God? (ESV) But these are completely contextually conditioned, and instances where pistis is unambiguously used as faithfulness (implying moral or ethical conduct rather than a posture of belief or trust) are about as rare as rocking-horse manure. Besides these two examples Matthew 23:23 / Luke 11:42; Galatians 5:22; and Revelation 2:10 and 14:12 (probably to possibly) instantiate pistis as faithfulness.

[2] Yes, I am aware that the Church can and should offer the world things like literacy, hospitals, and clean drinking water. But those good and noble and useful tasks — which God certainly is pleased by — are not exclusively the Church’s domain. There are plenty of other people and organizations of goodwill that offer these things. But the gospel belongs to the Church alone. And the consequences are even more tragic if we supply a tainted gospel to the world, than if we didn’t clean up their drinking water.

[3] The adjective pistos does often mean faithful.

[4] Bonhoeffer defined cheap grace as follows: Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. It is, ultimately, a sort of Temu grace that doesn’t acknowledge the horrors of our sin, and which doesn’t gather us into a community to which we are accountable. I suspect that there’s a similar instinct regarding faith among Team Faithfulness / Allegiance. This is a James 2 situation, where a cold, lifeless “faith” doesn’t lead to transformation. For James 2 is ultimately about faith, not works. Shocking, I know, but what does he say? Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works (James‬ ‭2‬:‭18‬ ‭ESV‬‬). It’s really the quality of faith James is concerned with, for genuine faith in Christ is never fruitless (John 15:5).

[5] Pisteúō is a verb derived from pistis. Apistía is a noun, the negated form of pistis.

[6] Yes, this characterization of the so-called “King Jesus Gospel,” and its accompanying ethic of “obedience-based discipleship” is provocative and salacious. I meant it to be. The Kingship / Lordship of Christ is meant to be unmitigated good news to struggling sinners and sufferers. The authors of the 16th century Heidelberg Catechism got this exactly right when they understood that Christ is not shorthand merely for King, but the threefold office of Prophet – Priest – King (see Hebrews 1:1-4); and that His Lordship is for the comfort of believers. This is evidenced by their questions and answers on Lord’s Days 12, 13:

Q. Why is He called “Christ” meaning “anointed”?
A. Because He has been ordained by God the Father and has been anointed with the Holy Spirit to be our chief prophet and teacher who perfectly reveals to us the secret counsel and will of God for our deliverance; our only high priest who has set us free by the one sacrifice of his body, and who continually pleads our cause with the Father; and our eternal king who governs us by His Word and Spirit and who guards us and keeps us in the freedom He has won for us.

Q. Why do you call Him “our Lord”?
A. Because – not with gold or silver, but with His precious blood – He has set us free from sin and from the tyranny of the devil, and has bought us, body and soul, to be His very own.

The “King Jesus Gospel” of “salvation by allegiance” is impoverished and anemic compared to this.