Gorman: "Cruciform Faith" (III)

Faith is the means of beginning life in Christ, life in the Spirit. Faith, alongside baptism, is initiation into the messianic faith and community. Those who believe are justified by faith, becoming children of God and heirs of Abraham, and recipients of the Spirit. Private belief and public confession of it, including baptism, are both needed for salvation.

Faith is the appropriate response to the gospel. It has a cognitive dimension: it affirms the content of the gospel as true. It involves confession of Jesus as Lord, which is also a confession that Caesar is not: what has become a “tradition” in our Jacuzzi-style baptismal pools was a political claim that very well marked one for treason! Faith also involves trust and confidence: it is “pride” in God and God alone, and the abandonment of all other grounds of assurance before God. Faith in God is loyalty or allegiance to God: this cannot be slighted.

Faith liberates and enslaves; it incorporates and inaugurates*. It liberates us from the interlocking directorate of hostile powers that enslave us in order to make us servants of God; it incorporates us into Christ; and it inaugurates in us a new life of faithfulness made possible by the Spirit.

Faith as Liberation. As a death experience, faith terminates certain relationships and realities. Those things characterizing a world in rebellion to God must be “died to”: idolatry, immorality, injustice. The “world” is the sphere in which sin reigns, and faith necessitates dying to it. Death to sin and the world involves death to self; the “self” is under the power of sin and controlled by its anti-God impulses, and therefore it must be crucified. In Galatians 2.19-20, Paul says that he himself has been crucified with Christ and no longer lives; i.e. he no longer lives for himself and the desires inspired by the flesh, just as he no longer lives for sin or the world. Rather, he lives for God, he lives for Christ. Faith is indeed a death experience, and as such it frees those who die and enter a new sphere of life from the reign of powers associated with a pre-death existence. This experience of liberation through sharing in Christ’s dying to sin and rising to new life toward God is a transfer of dominion, from a sphere of existence ruled by sin, death, and unrighteousness to one ruled by righteousness and life. It is a transfer from a malevolent to a benevolent Lord. Human beings always live under one master or another; what matters is being under the right master. True freedom is belonging to the right Master.

Faith as Re:Enslavement. Faith effects a liberation and, consequently, a “new” enslavement, enslavement to God, to Christ, to righteousness. Faith transfers us from the realm of sin, death, the self, the flesh, the Law, unrighteousness and what-have-you into the realm and reign of the world’s true Lord. The Old Testament Exodus was a signpost to Christ; the Exodus wasn’t a “context-less emancipation” but an “exchange of overlords.” Israel was liberated to become YHWH’s servant; likewise, we are liberated to become God’s servants. Enslavement to God is the critical disposition of genuine human living. Human beings apart from Christ belong to and live for themselves (1 Cor 6.19-20, 2 Cor 5.15); i.e. they live with themselves as the goal and benchmark of their lives in a sort of slavery to their own ambitions, desires, etc. Faith reorients humans away from self and towards God in whom we live; in the language of the slave market, God has redeemed believers by means of Christ’s death. We were bought at the slave market by God to become his slaves, which is the truest sense of freedom. Consequently, in Christ we are no longer “masters of our own fate” but have become the slaves of God. This shift of life-for-self to life-for-Christ is NOT an optional addition to faith; IT IS THE REASON CHRIST DIED (2 Cor 5.15). In Romans 6, Paul builds upon this new enslavement: believers are dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus; we are “enslaved to God.” Therefore, we are to daily offer our selves to God, our new Lord. The children of God are liberated from all past slaveries and their related fears, but only insofar as they are led by the Spirit.

Faith as Incorporation refers to the Christian’s incorporation into Christ and his body; faith (and baptism) transfers us from one sphere of life into another, that of life “in Christ” (see Gorman: Life in Christ, an earlier post). Faith as inauguration refers to our inauguration, by faith, into the community (or body) of Christ, as well as inauguration into a life of dying with Christ (cruciformity). This life of “dying” is a life of love; faith and love are inseparable. After all, what matters is “faith working through love.” (Galatians 5.6)

Gorman quotes E.P. Sanders from Paul & Palestinian Judaism: “[The] prime significance which the death of Christ has for Paul is… that, by sharing in Christ’s death, one dies to the power of sin or to the old aeon, with the result that one belongs to God. The transfer is not only one from the uncleanness and of idolatry and sexual immorality to cleanness and holiness, but from one lordship to another. The transfer takes place by participation in Christ’s death.”