LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW - Concordia Lutheran Seminary

22 LUTHERAN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW XII
Six years later, Adolf Deissmann drew further attention to these difficult
genitival constructions by proposing that they represented “a special type of
genitive, which might be called the ‘genitive of fellowship’ or the ‘mystical
genitive,’ because it indicates mystical fellowship with Christ.” 5
It wasn’t, however, until the late 1950s that the idea really began to catch
on. The impetus was a pair of groundbreaking articles by Gabriel Herbert
and Thomas Torrance, who once again raised the possibility that pi,stij
Cristou/ should be translated “faith of Christ”—not, however, due to the
contextual or theological concerns that had motivated previous proponents,
but because of what they considered to be the “Hebraic” idea of faith
underlying Paul’s term pi,stij. 6 If pi,stij, they argued, were actually the
preferred Greek translation of hn:Wma/ (faithfulness, distinct from faith), then
Paul’s expression would mean that God was continuing to manifest His
faithfulness through the faithfulness of His Son.
Within a few short years, however, this new version of the hypothesis
was practically demolished with one blow by James Barr, who undercut the
root of Hebert’s and Torrance’s assumptions about the “Hebraic”
underpinnings of pi,stij. Barr summarized part of his critique as follows:
“This supposed ‘Hebrew meaning’ was sustained only through great and
tendentious selectiveness within the linguistic evidence, through the use of
theological argument in lieu of linguistic argument, and in particular through
neglect of the verb !ymia/h, [i.e., hiphil of !ma] .” 7 Even more devastating was
Barr’s observation that, although Hebrew definitely has ways of expressing
both “faith” and “faithfulness”, it is the former idea, not the latter, which
everywhere dominates the New Testament. 8
Like a river blocked in its course, however, the proposal to translate
pi,stij Cristou/ as “the faith of Christ” simply found another channel in
which to keep moving. No one since Hebert and Torrance has argued for a
subjective interpretation of pi,stij Cristou/ on semantic grounds, yet the
ranks of those who favour that interpretation have increased manifold.
Increasing in both number and sophistication, the proportion of Biblical
scholars favouring “the faith of Christ” had grown by the late 1980s to the
point that an exasperated James Dunn likened them at one Society for
Biblical Literature meeting to “the headlong rush of the Gerasene swine into
5 Adolf Deissmann, Paul: A Study in Social and Religious History (London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1912) 163. This suggestion fit very well, of course, into Deissmann’s wider goal
of interpreting Paul not so much as a theologian but rather as a “mystic”.
6 A. G. Herbert, “Faithfulness and ‘Faith’”, Theology 58 (1955): 373-79, and Thomas F.
Torrance, “One Aspect of the Biblical Conception of Faith”, ExpTim 68 (1957): 111-14.
7 James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford University Press, 1961; repr.
London: SCM Press, 1983) 201. Barr’s full critique occupies pp.161-205.
8 Barr 203.