Believing, the Bible Way, by Fr. Lawrence R. Farley
by Archpriest Lawrence R. Farley
If there could be such a thing as a favorite Bible verse, for many people it would be John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Evangelical Protestants love the verse and delight to print it on T-shirts and posters, and to work it (seemingly) into every sermon. Even we Orthodox love this verse, and it features prominently in the Anaphora (or eucharistic consecration prayer) of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. To have eternal life, all we need to do is believe. But few ask themselves the real question: What does it mean to believe?
For many people (including perhaps some evangelicals, or at least the kind of evangelical I used to be before my conversion to Orthodoxy), the reality is that “to believe” simply means to give one’s intellectual assent, to acknowledge mentally that something is true. It describes a psychological action occurring in one’s head. In this sense, believing that Jesus is the Son of God is not much different, in essence, from believing that Albany is the capital of New York State. Though the former has greater significance than the latter, when I was a Protestant both were cerebral events in my head, assertions I made that may (or may not) have affected the way I lived my life. Thus “to believe in Jesus” meant to give mental assent to the fact that He was the Son of God and that He was my Savior. That is certainly one definition of what it means to believe. The only trouble is that it is not the biblical definition.
Reading Like a Greek
In reading the Bible, it helps to read like a Greek and to think like a Jew. Take the Greek bit first: the word translated “believe” or “belief” is the Greek pisteuo (the verb) or pistis (the noun). It is also translated “to have faith in” or “faith.” More significantly, it is also translated “to be faithful” or “faithfulness” (such as, for example, in Galatians 5:22). To translate pistis as “faithfulness” means that we begin to move the event of believing those saving and crucial twelve inches—from our head to our heart, that is, into the rest of our life. We are saved by our pistis, by our faithfulness to God.
As soon as we say this, we immediately see that there can be no dichotomy between “faith” and “works,” for pistis, faithfulness, includes both. Martin Luther, vexed over the words of the Epistle of St. James about being saved by works (James 2:24), once roundly offered anybody his teacher’s gown if they could harmonize St. James’s “saved by works” and St. Paul’s “saved by faith.” He might have saved his wardrobe, for salvation by pistis includes both. St. James and St. Paul were not squaring off against one another; they were fighting back to back against different adversaries. At the end of their contests, they would both affirm that we are saved by our faithfulness, by our discipleship to Jesus Christ. St. James would insist that we are not saved by simply acknowledging in our heads that Christ is the Messiah, and then living like any other worldling. And St. Paul would insist that we are not saved by piling up Jewish mitzvoth or good deeds, as if we could somehow earn God’s love and put Him in our debt. Rather, we are saved (as both would insist) by living a life of striving to please God, by loving Him as the center of our existence.
We can also see that translating pisteuo as “to be faithful” means that we understand this faithfulness to be a lifelong project. Beginning to be faithful takes but a moment, but being truly faithful takes longer and stands the test of time. All married people know this (or will soon find it out). It takes a mere moment for them to become married, to have the priest place the matrimonial crown on their heads and crown them with glory and honor, or to have the minister have the couple say “I do” and pronounce them “man and wife.” But to truly say one is faithful in marriage takes years. Matrimonial faithfulness is a process—and one that takes work. (Sorry, but the romantic comedies are lying.)
As with marriage, so with the Kingdom of God: it takes but a moment for a catechumen to become one of the Faithful. The priest plunges the previously dry candidate into the waters of the saving font, saying, “The servant of God is baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”—and then one is “in.” That is, immediately after the rites of Christian initiation, one is saved, one has pistis, saving faithfulness. One is a servant of God and a disciple of Jesus Christ.
But (unless one dies right afterwards, like the thief on the cross) one then begins an entire life as a disciple of Jesus. Discipleship is truly begun in baptism/chrismation, but it cannot end there if it is true discipleship. Faithfulness, whether in marriage (faithfulness to one’s spouse) or in the Kingdom (faithfulness to God), presupposes living an entire life in that blessed state. Faithfulness, biblical pistis, is always tried and tested by the steady onslaught of years. That is why it includes fasting, praying, almsgiving, church-going, repenting, forgiving, Bible-reading, and a whole lot of other things besides.
And, as any seasoned Christian can tell you, it includes a lot of falling down. To be faithful doesn’t mean being sinless. To be sure, we all strive for sinlessness. But none of us achieve it. Justification by faith and sanctification by the Spirit are, like St. James’s works and St. Paul’s faith, the same reality seen from two different perspectives. Let me try to explain what I mean.
We all sin constantly (hence that line in the Lord’s Prayer about “forgive us our trespasses”), and that means we all repent constantly—that is, if we are being faithful. And happily, that means we are being forgiven and justified constantly. But repentance also means that we loathe what we have done wrong, and that, with God’s help, we try to do better and to improve. That is, in part, what “sanctification” means. Thus, though justification and sanctification can be distinguished in Western theology manuals (those dusty tomes), they cannot be separated in real life, for they are both a part of striving to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ. Thus, to be faithful doesn’t mean we never do anything wrong. Rather, it means that even when we do wrong, we refuse to turn our face away from the God who has turned His face to us.
Thinking Like a Jew
This is perhaps a good place to explain what I meant by “thinking like a Jew.” In our Western, post-Enlightenment society, we tend not to be true biblical theists, but rather deists. The God we most easily imagine is the absentee-landlord God, the God of the philosophers, the God who made the world and then more or less went on extended sabbatical. He is the God who wound the world up like a watch and then sat back to watch it tick. That is, we most easily think of God as a Mind, an abstract concept, perhaps with a white beard. In this very non-Jewish way of thinking, we find it easy to say that “to believe” means to hold certain views about this abstract God.
But this is not the Jewish way (or rather the biblically Jewish way) to think about God. In the biblically Jewish way, God is not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is the scary God, the Incalculable, the One who commanded Abraham to offer up his firstborn, the “Fear of Isaac” (Genesis 31:42), the One who wrestled with Jacob and left him lame. We do not so much think about Him as approach Him with joy and trembling. In this we are like Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s classic tale, The Wind in the Willows. Along with Mole, Rat first comes upon his deity, the great god Pan, in the early dawn. Mole is rooted to the spot with an awe that turns his muscles to water. “Rat!” he finds the breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmurs the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”
This is the God with whom we have to do. The word of faith we speak and the life of faithfulness we live are not things we concoct on our own, like exercises in philosophy. They are our response to Him who first speaks to us. He is the great I AM, the eternal Thou, the face from which heaven and earth will one day flee away (Revelation 20:11). It is this face that is now turned to us in love, and who calls us by name. Faith, pistis, is the frail and halting word we speak out in answer. Faith is loving God—and, as St. John reminds us, “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
It is true that all we need do to be saved is to believe. But that is scarier, and more glorious, than we might first have thought. In Christ, the Unapproachable One has approached us, interrupted our smiling and fatal march to perdition, and shaken us out of our composure. In heartbreaking humility, He demands our love and our life. “To believe” means that we allow ourselves to be embraced by Him, and broken, and loved and changed. It is the scariest thing in the world. It is the only thing worth living for.
Archpriest Lawrence Farley pastors St. Herman of Alaska Orthodox Mission (OCA) in Surrey, B.C., Canada. He received his B.A. from Trinity College, Toronto, and his M.Div. from Wycliffe College, Toronto. A former Anglican priest, he converted to Orthodoxy in 1985 and studied for two years at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Seminary in Pennsylvania. He is the author of the multi-volumed Bible Study Companion Series, published by Conciliar Press.
This article was originally printed in the Vol. 12 No. 1 issue of The Handmaiden, published by Conciliar Press, Winter 2008.
Wisdom from the Ages
Faith, like active prayer, is a grace. For prayer, when activated by love through the power of the Spirit, renders true faith manifest—the faith that reveals the life of Jesus. If, then, you are aware that such faith is not at work within you, that means your faith is dead and lifeless. In fact you should not even speak of yourself as one of the “faithful” if your faith is merely theoretical and not actualized by the practice of the commandments or by the Spirit. Thus faith must be evidenced by progress in keeping the commandments, or it must be actualized and translucent in what we do. This is confirmed by St. James when he says, “Show me your faith through your works and I will show you the works that I do through my faith” (cf. James 2:18.)
—Saint Gregory of Sinai, The Philokalia, Vol. 4
Come now, my brethren—all who have received the name of faith, who have been deemed worthy to be called people of Christ—do not put aside our calling; let us not violate our faith through improper works. It is not enough for someone merely to be known as a believer, so let us show our faith through works.
—Saint John of Damascus
But let us examine ourselves and test whether we are truly Christians. According to the apostolic injunction, “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith” (2 Cor. 13:5), for without faith it is not possible to be a Christian. We show the outward signs of Christianity, as we said above, but do we have true Christianity within us? For everything outward is nothing without the inward, and outward signs apart from very truth are a lie and hypocrisy.
—Saint Tikhon of Zadonsk, Journey to Heaven