THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
koina. Acts ii. 44, iv. 32). The entire community is pledged to belief in the reality and imminence of God's sway (parousia). And faith in its essence is this practical Old Testament conviction, made radiant and all-controlling by the life of Christ. It is this stage of the New Testament development of faith that is represented by the Epistle of James and the First Epistle of Peter.
It was the work of Paul to go to the root of the great conception first shaped by the Hebrew prophets. He did this, not by outgrowing the primitive Christian eschatology (for Chris-
3. Paul, tianity is fundamentally eschatologic), but by applying the work and mind of Christ to the ultimate problem, the problem of character as personality. His conversion flushed his emotions with the feeling of the divine creativeness (I Cor. xv. 8; Eph. iii. 8). His work as missionary to the Gentiles deepened this experience. It was given to him to build congregations of Christians from the ground (I Cor. i. 26 sqq.; Rom. iv. 17-18). The creative character of God manifested in Christ became the starting-point of his thinking.
When the Judaizing Christians denied his standing as an apostle and sought to stamp his work with their own views, he was driven to a fundamental analysis of the prophetic term faith, and to turn its creative and critical force against the Pharisaic conception of religious merit (erga nomou). How is true character or personality (dikaiosune) possible? Of course the Pauline conception of righteousness differs from the conception entertained by the Hebrew prophets; four centuries of Judaism have intervened; the subjective mood is far stronger; the individual is the center of gravity. Yet the apostle continued to think along prophetic lines. He differed broadly from the monastical individual of a later age. While the salvation of the individual is his conscious aim, he thinks about the individual's blessings in terms of the common good (I Cor. ii. 9-10, xiii.). The point in question is God's ability and willingness to keep his promise of a heavenly commonwealth (Rom. iii. 4; II Cor. i. 20). To be saved by Christ is to have been brought into quickening relation with the supreme hope (Rom. viii. 24). The two great ethical terms righteousness and right, which with the separation of Church from State become more or less separated and specialized, must be brought together in thought if we are to interpret aright the words of Rom. i. 16-17.
Paul's monotheism is best contrasted with Aristotle's. To use more or less inaccurate terms, Paul's conception is an " ethical monotheism," while Aristotle's is metaphysical. That is to say, Aristotle's final statement is in terms of pure reason, while Paul's is in terms of common and social wellbeing. It is in the unity between Jew and Gentile that lor him the mystery of things centers (mysterwn, Rom. xi. 25 sqq.; Eph. ii. 11-iii. 19). The religious and social unity of the Mediterranean world was his supreme object. As with Isaiah, so, on a different level, with Paul, the creative and vitalizing unity of God invading history through Christ is the all-controlling thought. God can
efficiently manifest himself only in terms of human unity (Rom. iii. 27 sqq.; I Cor. i.-iv.; Phil. i. 27ii. 11). A saving faith is, necessarily, a creatively social ^aith (the two editions of the trilogy: I Thes„. i. 3, and I Cor. xiii. 13). Faith in Christ pledges the redeemed man to the realization of the kingdom of God (Gal. v. 6).
t In the Epistle to the Hebrews the Hellenistic 'or metaphysical element enters, coming from Alexandrine Judaism and its reflective view of revelation. But the Hellenic element is controlled and directed by the prophetic element. Faith is defined (xi. 1) as that state of the heart and that bias of will in men which gives substance to things hoped for and secures a solid conviction regarding the reality of things unseen. Here as elsewhere faith is inseparable from the kingdom of God. The things hoped for are the messianic blessings promised by God through the prophets. Faith in Christ gives them a body, imparts to the conscience moral certitude touching the end and issues of history. Owing to the blending of the philosophical and prophetic elements in this definition the Church catholic adopted it as its working conception.
The different shades of meaning in New Testament writers serve to bring out more clearly the decisive agreement. Faith is the saving assent of the heart to Christ's proclamation of the supreme moral order described as the kingdom of God. The creedal conception of faith grows out of this conception, under the historical conditions of a later period in the Church. But, owing to those conditions, the creedal conception is not wholly true to the New Testament emphasis on the kingdom of God. Faith, in the New Testament sense, is man's perception of the spiritual and moral order of experience and life offered to man by God in Christ. But it is more than a perception. It is the supreme form of will-power in man. By faith he perceives, and in faith he wills and, under God, ordains the moral equality and the moral end of human history. Through the believer's self-surrender to the divine plan for the nation and the race, God gives him a righteousness that has vitalizing and unifying power among the complications of life, and at the same time, gives to society the promise of justice and right. Without this organizing power, faith shrivels to the individual's confidence in his personal salvation.
Henry S. Nash.
II. The Doctrine in Theology: Faith, in the language of religion, is that personal attitude by which divine revelation is subjectively appropriated. With Paul it was the all-sufficient ground of righteousness and justification (Rom. iv. 22 sqq.)— a view which was soon obscured in the
1. Before Christian Church. With the Aposthe Refor- tolic Fathers the connection of faith
mation. with the attitude of love was more a postulate than an inherent necessity (I Clement x. 7, xii. 1; Shepherd of Hernias, Sim- VIII. ix. 1). Moralistic and intellectualistic thoughts of foreign origin penetrated Christianity and as early as Clement of Alexandria faith was supplanted by love as condition of salvation and