It seems likely that in the very first days of Judeo-Christianity, the claim that Jesus simple was God, and not just his “son” etc., or was part of a trinity, was controversial. Especially to its overwhelmingly Jewish audience. And so, read more closely, the early pronouncements of Judeo Christianity seem to fudge on that subject. Jesus rarely simply said he was God. But 99% of the time, more often merely asked “who do you say I am.” Here statistics might begin to indicate a need for a theological revision or reconsideration.

While indeed, the recent trend to see Jesus more as a fallible human being, seems to do the same.

And, read more closely, the Bible – outside of Paul – many have said, seems to stress a religion based on observation of “fruits,” “works,” “signs,” “deeds,” and “proofs”; based on material evidence that we ourselves have “seen.”

This is true not only in the OT, but also to some extent, even in the New.

For that reason, I’m enclined to revise our understanding of “faith”; to stand for not an inner feeling of fidelity, of belief, no matter how seemingly exhaulted, but in the sence that Wright rightly explores: it just means faithfully or consistently, following the commands, of God.

In other words, it means not “having faith,” in your spirit; but actually, reliablly – faithfully – doing what God told us to do.

The whole stress on “FAITH” therefore, is almost wholly a New Testament – and even overwhelmingly Pauline – development. (Unless you read the NT “faith”/pistis, as Wright suggested, not as an inner sensation, but as the traditional, OT faithful or obedient loyalty to the old covenants. But that is a usage at odds with modern Christianity).

For these and other reasons, I’d have to say I don’t have much confidence that what we today call “faith” really is the intended heart of Christianity at all.

In fact I think we ought to consider the enormous room which opens out for an appreciation of the faith of Jesus (in relation to our own) during that span between incarnation and baptism.

You may say this period is no more to us than a cypher – and so it is. But there was a real life lived there prior to his coming down to the Jordan. Full of faith and perhaps disappointment, and certainly growth of character.

I don’t mean to suggest the error that Jesus was human before his baptism and divine afterwards. I only suggest that the faith he lived in those hidden days may have been more natural and necessary to him than during his public career, when he entered increasingly (I would guess) upon a state closer to knowledge. From God’s perspective, the pre-baptism period may have been as important as the public teaching period of the mission as a whole.

Anyway, thanks for opening the discussion, Kyle, because I feel inspired to do some more thinking and writing on this lovely possibility that, prior to his baptism, it is more likely that Jesus lived a life of faith which more resembles ours – which places us right by his side in the Jordan with the Baptist, if nothing else. I hear Paul’s baptism metaphors in the background somewhere.

James 2:20 You foolish man, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless ?
James 2:26″As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead”

from this we can see that deeds are required if one is to ascribe the term faith to an individual. Therefore, i propose to you that the word faith is to be used as you would use a verb, as an action.

James 2:22
You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did.

You can do without faith, but you cannot faith without doing.

Galatians 5:4-6 (New American Standard Bible)
4 You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace.
5 For we through the Spirit, by faith, are waiting for the hope of righteousness.
6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love.

once again faith is working through an action, in this case love. love is not a feeling, it is shown by obedience and service, devotion and truth.

“Listen” to this passage
1 Thessalonians 1:3
3 constantly bearing in mind your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ in the presence of our God and Father,

are you beginning to see that faith is an action not a thought process?
Do you want to see how we know that Jesus had perfect faith?

read this scripture
James 2:22
22You see that faith was working with his works, and as a result of the works, faith was perfected;

Traditionally, Jesus is affirmed as both fully God and fully man and not, somehow, a third kind of thing – a godman in a way which somehow blends the two. I think that Thomas’ understanding actually leans this way because it tends to undermine Jesus’ humanity.

I think the key question has to do with what faith is in the first place, and what we want to say about the incarnate Christ. I do lean a subjective direction for a variety of reasons, initially, through grammatical argumentation but finally for theological reasons. Christ’s faith, as it were, carves out space for our own faith. Christ’s obedience to the Father – his own faithfulness – is lived as faith and not as another kind of thing, which therefore provides the space for his faith to apply vicariously to us. So, despite our faithlessness, he is faithful.

In this sense, I think a subjective reading does better justice to the tenor of the Gospel, and helps delineate well between Christ’s obedience and our own faith.

Many people have found a mediating position appealing, but I think its ambiguity has more to do with translation into English than with Greek. We could, as it were, say that about virtually every genitive used in the New Testament – there are always a variety of ways to translate a genitive into English, or a dative, etc., for that matter. To take a mediating position then would be relatively similar to saying that the word awful means full of awe and terrible at the same time. Presumably, there is a wider context within which we read that word, linguistic, grammatical and, in this case, theological, which must inform how we read these things.

Furthermore, with this issue, if one accepts a subjective reading, that these key passages refer to Christ’s own faith, they also accept, because of broader theological commitments, that believers have faith in Christ. The same is not true for an objective reading which tends to try and rule out Christ having faith at all – which many, most notably Thomas Aquinas, does with his understanding of Jesus’s beatific knowledge.

A lot depends on which one of these interpretations is right. Though I don’t know much Greek, I would say however that this is the way it all settled down in English: the phrase “the faith of Christ” keeps the question deliberately open to both interpretations. In order to strike a balance between two major competing theologies, in the days before Nicea.

The first theology, would be the one that insisted that 1)surely Jesus, as God, knew everything already. And therefore, Jesus did not even need faith at all. Which would suggest therefore, that the meaning of the term “faith of Christ,” is not Jesus’ faith in God, but our faith in him.

Vs. the competing theology. That asserted that 2) Jesus was human. And therefore Jesus in some sense, like an ordinary human, did not know everything. So that therefore, Christ did need something like ordinary human faith: confidence in things not fully understood. Christ in some sense did not know everything – and therefore actually needed faith in the sense that we ourselves might.

Which of these two interpretations of phrase “the faith of Christ” is right? (A question which may or may not correspond to your “subjective” vs. “objective” readings). Personally, I think the text was kept deliberately ambivalent, and open to both interpretations.

Often biblical translations deliberately retain poetic ambiguity, in order to simultaneously accomodate two or more competing theologies. In this case, the phrase “The faith of Jesus,” would be a deliberate ambiguity, to try to accomodate the days when the matter of Jesus’ exact status – as 1) God or 2) man, as 1) fully knowledgeable or 2) not – was in question. In the days before Nicea.

Is this what you are already talking about? Or is this a slightly different, but perhaps related matter? In any case, this is what the phrase finally looks like in English: it seems deliberately open to two intertpretations. I’m guessing it is similarly ambiguous in Greek as well. Or in any case, I would say that this is what our English translators did with ” the faith of Christ”: they for the moment, left it deliberately ambiguous.

That’s how that single phrase shakes down in English. Though to be sure, there are other parts in the NT when Jesus seemed to not have complete foreknowledge of everything. And to therefore have faith in the ordinary human sense. Of trying to believe things that he did not completely understand. Though possibly even those episodes, are themselves open to a second reading too.

Eventually of course, the Roman Catholic Church tried to strike a balance between these two. And to assert that Jesus was both “Fully man and fully god.” That the human part of him did not know everything, and needed faith. So that after all, he showed us a model of what a mere human could do. We could model ourselves after him. He was a human being who could make mistakes, who did not know everything, but who nevertheless managed to do good. Through faith. Which he needed, the same as everyone else.

But being fully God, in a sense Jesus knew what he did not know. And his faith was always right.

So finally his faith was somehow both a reflection of human ignorance, but also godlike knowledge, or acceptance of truth.

?

Is that what this is about? And if so, is it fair to suggest that the text itself, did not really quite want to decide between the two possible readings? Since either reading alone presents problems. While many were deciding that somehow, it would be possible to accomodate both.