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.
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