Gorman: "Cruciform Faith" (I)

Gorman begins his lengthy chapters on faith by looking at a term from Catholic morality: our fundamental option. He uses the term in a way different from classic Catholic morality, defining it here as one’s posture before God. People are basically oriented towards God or away from God. It’s about one’s disposition towards God. We have the fundamental option to either accept or refuse the love and grace of God offered in Christ. The fundamental option refers to the free and basic self-commitment to either love God or not love him.

Our “proper” stance before God is one of surrender to God. It is the total act of the will to surrender oneself to our Creator. This surrender to God involves a surrender to the demands God makes on us as persons. His ownership and demands are right, because, as Creator, he has fashioned us and truly owns us. He who surrenders to God will seek to integrate with his basic intention every part of his life, so that grace makes its way from our center to our extremities, spreading into our acts of free choice and our operation in the world.

Our proper stance before God is our fundamental option rightly ordered.

In the Old Testament, this “proper stance” was defined as “love for God.”

“Love for God” is total surrender to self-commitment in loving God.

In the Old Testament, God demanded total commitment and nothing less. For Israel, “love of God” was the appropriate response to God’s initiative in their calling and Exodus. “Love of God” has both an affective dimension and an ethical (or political) one. The first involves self-abandonment, devotion, and trust; the second involves “hearing,” loyalty, and obedience. “Love of God” is a political idiom, a pledge of allegiance to the policies of YHWH, to refuse any other allegiance, ultimate love, or loyalty; love for God is about FAITH and FAITHFULNESS.

Paul only occasionally speaks of “love of God.” The twofold sense of trust and faithfulness are carried forward into the New Testament by the shorthand “faith.”

Faith is the comprehensive and proper response to God as revealed in Christ.

Faith is humanity’s proper stance before God, and it involves both trust and faithfulness.

Faith is devotional, total commitment, and loyalty to God and his ways.

For Paul, abandonment to God is specifically abandonment to God as revealed in Christ. It is abandonment to a God who is just, loving, merciful and full of grace; it is abandonment to God not as a capricious, vindictive, or hateful God but to a God whose disposition towards us is that of a Father.

Paul attributes faith not ONLY to believers but also to Christ. Jesus’ fundamental stance towards God was one of trust and faithfulness, a posture of obedience before God culminating in his faithful death. The faith of the Christian is informed by the faith of Christ: our faith is “Christ-faith,” the relationship to God that Christ exemplified, the life-stance that he actualized and which now characterizes the faith of all who live in him. The believers’ faith, patterned after Christ’s life and death, is from start-to-finish a liberating, life-giving “death”, the “obedience of faith” that is our proper response to God’s initiative in Christ.

The appropriate fundamental stance for human beings is faith, an initial and ongoing experience of dying to self and living for God. There are two kinds of “dying with Christ” in Paul: initial death with Christ, a decisive past event transforming one’s identity and existence, involving, to some degree, baptism; and existential death, the ongoing “death to self” in the arena of sanctification. This faith isn’t static but dynamic; it’s active rather than inactive. This faith is narrative: it tells a story. The “action” and “dynamo” of faith is faithfulness, obedience to Christ through cruciformity.