“A Movement of Infinity within Itself: Faith for Both the
Johannine Community & Today”
By Rev. Eric Atcheson
Respectfully submitted
to the Northwest Association for Theological Discussion in response to “Believing in Jesus: A Johannine Theology of
Faith” by Dr. Dennis Lindsay, February 2015
On the bookshelf in my office as I write these
words is a book I brought with me when I served as an adult chaperone on a
youth mission trip to Tijauana, Mexico, way back in my seminary days (yes, “way
back,” whilst I’m at the ripe old age of 29).
Written by the amusing Jon Acuff, the volume is entitled, “Stuff
Christians Like,” a play on Christian Lander’s earlier (and similarly amusing)
book, “Stuff White People Like.” And the
book is simply a collection of odes and paeans to different things what
Christians like—and like to do—such as complaining about not being “fed” at
church, using “let me pray about it” as a euphemism for “no,” and using “faith
like a child” as an escape pod from difficult theological discussions.
All of these examples have something in common:
they utilize commonplace vocabulary to say something distinctly uncommon unless
you belong to a particular brand of Christianity and are fluent in its unique
and idiosyncratic dialect. I tend to
view these sorts of verbal encodings as an offshoot of how even the Bible uses
its own Greek vocabulary in sometimes taking a particular koine, common, word
or phrase and turning it completely on its head to mean something different to
a person within the early Jesus movement, but that might mean nothing or even
nonsense (like John of Patmos’s Revelation) to an outsider.
John the Evangelist (not to be confused with
John of Patmos—for the sake of simplicity here, when I refer to John, I am
referring to the otherwise anonymous primary writer of the Gospel of John) is a
master of this adroit use of the Greek language. Though his vocabulary and syntax are
relatively straightforward compared to many other New Testament works, John
skillfully weaves in double and alternate meanings to particular words and
phrases, and, in cases like that of Nicodemus in John 3 (with Jesus’s use of anothen, or being “born again/above”),
or the Samaritan woman in John 4 (with Jesus’s use of phgh, or “spring/fountain” as “living water”), even makes those
double meanings a point of contention in Jesus’s teachings.
All of this is to say: in reading through Dr.
Lindsay’s paper for both the first and second time, I was particularly struck
not merely by his tally of John’s use of pisteuein
but also of the noting of John’s deliberate eschewing of pistis, a detail I myself had failed to
glean during my (admittedly rudimentary) Greek studies of John’s Gospel during
my college and seminary days. I agree
that this choice must have been deliberate on John’s part (see above—John was
clearly very deliberate about his word choices throughout his Gospel), but in
attempting to put this exegetical reality within the larger context in which
John’s Gospel was put to writing, I cannot help but believe that John’s use of pisteuein, insofar as it creates new
meaning to John’s community, represents what Bible scholars Richard L.
Rohrbaugh and Bruce J. Malina call “antilanguage.”
Dennis C. Duling provides an excellent and concise
definition of antilanguage thusly in a passage on John’s language and writing
style:
Antilanguage
is a type of language used by groups who are “marginal” with respect to the
larger society, which in the most general sense is Mediterranean society but in
a more restricted sense is more traditional Israelite society. The key in this case is the choice of
believers to live in opposition to “this world” and “the Israelites” (NRSV:
“the Jews”). Their “antilanguage” is
thus an expression of their “antisociety” stance.[1]
My underlying thesis for what follows is this:
that this frequency of use and particular usage of pisteuein as highlighted and interpreted by Dr. Lindsay represents
a word of the antilanguage that John—and the Johannine community—would have
been fluent in, and that it remains firmly in the antilanguage lexicon today,
not only by right of our own (perhaps less-than-accurate) translations of
John’s Gospel but by our own misapplications of the Gospel in a Christ-centered
faith even today.
Throughout the New Testament, faith (and
similar “fruits of the spirit”) is presented as in opposition to this world not
merely by John but also by Paul[2]
and by James, the brother of Jesus[3]. Considering the vehemence with which this
world was in opposition to Christ Himself,
such sentiment is unsurprising, but the marginalized status of Jesus was
a status inherited by His followers and, I would contend, especially so by His
Johannine followers. As Howard Clark Kee
conveys, “The kinds of hostility the sect (the
Johannine Community –E.A.) can expect are named in John 16: expulsion from
the synagogues and martyrdom.”[4] This sort of retro-interjection of such
trauma is part of a pattern for John: he is indicating his sect “perhaps
because of their increasingly vocal claims about Jesus’s divinity has been
banished from fellowship in the synaoguge.
The expulsion was evidently traumatic for John, who responds by
retrojecting the event back into the time of Jesus and insisting that his group
is spiritually superior to their synagogue critics.”[5]
Ergo, even more so than the Christianity
espoused by Paul or by James, the first-century Near Eastern world had little
appetite for the Christianity practiced by John’s followers, and it shows in
John’s Gospel and letters, not simply in that John and his community are
isolated and alienated, but that in the midst of said isolation and alienation,
he (and they) believe wholeheartedly in the spiritual superiority of their faith compared to their critics’ beliefs.
To John, then, the Judean critics and persecutors of Jesus lack not
merely correct belief, they lack true faith as well.
What these circumstances have to do with faith,
with pisteuein, or with antilanguage,
is an important question in translating John.
Consider, for a moment, the primary alternative translation of pisteuein: not “faith,” but “belief,” or
“to believe (in).” Well-known and
well-loved translations including both the King James Version and the New
American Standard Bible will translate instances of pisteuein in the Gospel of John as “believing” rather than as, say,
“having faith in.”[6] Ultimately, and with the least amount of
hubris possible that is inherent in a lone parish pastor attempting to correct
a longstanding Bible translation, I would suggest this treatment of pisteuein to be antithetical to what
John was endeavoring to communicate with his use of pisteuein as a possible example of antilanguage.
Why?
Because there is a subtle but key distinction between belief and faith,
which Dr. Lindsay points us toward simply and elegantly in his paper, at the
top of page six: “Faith for John is thus both an identification with and an
engagement with Christ in a relationship of servant to lord.”[7]
Belief, by contrast, merely implies
intellectual assent. One can choose to
believe in Santa Claus, or in extraterrestrial life, but those beliefs need not
dictate one’s moral decisions (at least, outside of the ever-elongating Christmas
season or binge-watching sessions of Doctor Who). Belief does not demand relationship, nor does
it demand any engagement beyond a yes or no answer to the hypothesis being
presently considered.
In other words, belief is, at its purest form,
a sort of intellectual transaction or interaction. Assent or negation is proffered in response
to a stated value, fact, or reality.
Without attempting to denigrate the Hebrew Bible tradition in any way, I
believe this is why Paul places such importance upon grace vis-à-vis the
law. One can assent to obey the law or
not as one can even assent to obey a lord, but the belief in the law or in a
lord (and by this I mean a lord in the feudal sense) does not justify a person,
because that belief does not represent the change of nature that faith can
achieve.
Ultimately, this difference between the two is
likewise illuminated in Dr. Lindsay’s work: “Genuine faith enables vision
(11:40)…It is thus unthinkable within the context of John’s Gospel to
understand this faith/vision as anything other than the allegiance-yielding
identification and engagement with Christ…”[8] None of this is possible merely through
holding a belief; it only becomes possible when that belief grows, like a
sapling into a tree, into a fully blown faith that shapes and dictates a
person’s life that allows them to “see,” as it were, God’s presence before
them.
Yet we associate belief and sight
nonetheless—after all, “seeing is believing.” For John’s community, though,
seeing is wholly unnecessary to belief.
This is not only what Jesus teaches according to John[9],
it is what was, in fact, physically necessary, because even if one were to
believe that the Johannine community saw Jesus as an immortal figure who
transcended time itself—after all, in John 8:58, Jesus exclaims, “Very truly, I
tell you, before Abraham was, I am!”—His physical presence was still lacking
from the world from the time of His ascension per the Gospel of Luke. Jesus cannot be seen, and nor for that matter
can God, a reality John concedes in his first letter.[10]
Rather, as that very same verse from 1 John
goes on to teach, it is God who lives in us, invisible to us but whose love
gets perfected in us over time. With
God’s love in us through Jesus Christ, we are able to have faith—and thus “see”
the unseeable: the divine. And so we remain
“in” the divine.
All of this is acutely necessary to the
Johannine community as it withstood marginalization and oppression, and it
remains necessary to us today, even as we emphatically do not experience the
same level of marginalization and oppression (despite vehement protestations to
the contrary by some of our American Christian brethren). The grandparent of Christian existentialism,
who strove constantly to merge the notions of faith and experience, Soren
Kierkegaard, once wrote, “He who loves God without faith reflects upon himself;
he who loves God in faith reflects upon God.”[11]
In short: faith is what allows us to see God. Perhaps this should not be so revolutionary a
thought to us today, but in a first-century world of religion governed by law
and by coercion more so than by faith or by grace, it almost certainly would
be. And in a 21st-century
world governed by consumerism and unchecked greed, the idea of seeing the
unseeable rather than striving for the tangible worth of materialism is, in
point of fact, still very much revolutionary.
It is difficult to over-emphasize just how
great the importance is to John of our faith, our “seeing the unseeable.” Per Rudolf Schnakenburg, “The one thing
demanded of man (sic) is faith, this
is the great Johannine formula for salvation: He who believes in the Son has
eternal life.”[12] Yet Schnakenburg cites arguably the most
famous verse in Scripture—John 3:16—in such a way that 3:16’s use of pisteuein is once more translated as
“believes in” rather than “has faith in.”
To this day, we are still using the two terms interchangeably in our
translations of John when, with a plethora of Biblical translations available
to English readers, we can afford the luxury of choosing precision.
Yet we do not always choose to in favor of the
wording we have known and accepted for years—witness the still strong popularity
of the relatively inaccurate King James Version translation.
The irony of this is that it does not have to
be this way; translators have shown a willingness to correct potential
inaccuracies of translations past, such as changing the translation of hoi ioudaioi from “the Jews” to “the
Jewish leaders” (in the Common English Bible) or “the Judeans” (in the Complete
Jewish Bible), and yet, we have continued to neglect to offer pisteuein the same treatment.
In this way, faith language remains a form of antilanguage
for an antisociety, even as Christianity still remains, numerically at least,
the most popular religion in the world.
Yet for as many—literally billions—of people who profess Christianity as
their faith of choice, we still seem to possess a lack of more people who, in
Dr. Lindsay’s words, are true to John’s Jesus, for “to remain in Jesus,
therefore, is to produce the work(s) that Jesus does, just as Jesus’ remaining
in the Father allows him to do the works of the Father.”[13] We remain lacking in producing the works of
Jesus to this day.
I am fully cognizant of the implications of
what it is I am suggesting in that previous paragraph: that even the faith of
billions has yet been inadequate in remedying a great many of the world’s harms
which Jesus indicts and calls upon us to remedy. However, we in our human condition remain
difficult to teach new forms and acts of pisteuein,
of faith. As Dr. Lindsay notes in his
concluding paragraph, even as John’s concept of faith is rooted in the
Septuagint[14],
this is still “all new in John’s Gospel.”[15] To no small extent, it remains new even
today, or at the very least, under-practiced.
In concluding my remarks, I would draw once
more from Kierkegaard: “Faith is the movement of infinity within itself, and it
cannot be otherwise. Everything previous
is preparatory, preliminary, something which disappears as soon as the
conviction arrives. Otherwise, there
would be no resting in a conviction, for then to have conviction would mean
perpetually to repeat the reasons.”[16] What John calls us to, perhaps above anything
else, in His Gospel is to rest in the conviction that having faith in God as
revealed through Jesus Christ will cause us to experience the fullness of God’s
love for us. As we experience that
divine love by way of our human faith, we, in turn, strive to bring others into
experiencing that selfsame divine love.
How we strive to do so, though, comes down to our production of not only
the works of Jesus Christ, but our production of His words as well. The religious language we use has always
mattered, but with a wide Christian-oriented theological vocabulary to choose
from in 21st-century English, I hope and pray we would do well to
think of how our own language sounds at its core—and how we might use it, along
with every other ounce of our being, to bring forth the love of God to a
hurting world that remains in desperate need of such love.
In this way, may our own movement of infinity
within itself continue on.
Rev. Eric Atcheson
Vancouver & Longview, Washington
January 2015
Works Cited
Dennis C. Duling, The New Testament: History, Literature, and Social Context, Thomson
Wadsworth, 2003
Stephen L. Harris, The New Testament: A Student’s Introduction, Fifth Edition, McGraw-Hill,
2006
Howard C. Kee, Understanding the New Testament, Fifth Edition, Prentice Hall, 1993
Soren A. Kierkegaard, Provocations, edited by Charles E. Moore, Plough Publishing House,
2002
Dennis R. Lindsay, “Believing in Jesus: A Johannine Theology of Faith,” 2015
Rudolf Schnakenburg, New Testament Theology Today, translated by David Askew, Palm
Publishers, 1963
[1]
Dennis C. Duling, The New Testament:
History, Literature, and Social Context, Thomson Wadsworth, 2003, 417.
[2] Galatians
5:16-17: “Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the
flesh. For what the flesh desires is
opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for
these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.”
(NRSV)
[3] James
3:14-15, 17: “But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts,
do not be boastful and false to the truth.
Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual,
devilish…But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle,
willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality
or hypocrisy.” (NRSV)
[4]
Howard C. Kee, Understanding the New
Testament, Fifth Edition, Prentice Hall, 1993, 179.
[5]
Stephen L. Harris, The New Testament: A
Student’s Introduction, McGraw-Hill, 2006, 229.
[6]
Eg, John 12:39: “…they could not believe…,” rather than, say, “they could not
have faith in…”
[7]
Dennis R. Lindsay, Believing in Jesus: A
Johannine Theology of Faith, 6
[8]
Ibid, 6-7
[9]
John 20:29: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to pisteusantes—believe.” (NRSV)
[10] 1
John 4:12: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us,
and His love is perfected in us.” (NRSV)
[11]
Soren A. Kierkegaard, Provocations,
edited by Charles E. Moore, Plough Publishing House, 2002, 275.
[12]
Rudolf Schnakenburg, New Testament
Theology Today, translated by David Askey, Palm Publishers, 1963, 98
[13]
Dennis R. Lindsay, Believing in Jesus: A
Johannine Theology of Faith, 11-12
[14] I
regret that I could not devote my response more towards the Hebrew roots of
John’s pisteuein usage, but the
brutal truth is that I am poorly equipped to exegete ancient Hebrew and would
only do it a disservice.
[15]
Ibid, 24
[16]
Soren A. Kierkegaard, Provocations,
edited by Charles E. Moore, Plough Publishing House, 2002, 270
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