Paul and Faith

Christianity is the world’s largest religion. Christians believe in the New Testament, the oldest part of which is letters Paul wrote to Greek-speaking Christian communities in the mid-1st century. Luke’s nativity story came decades later.

Paul had a clear idea of his faith, and he wrote clearly. In Paul’s time, Jesus Christ’s time, life for most was nasty, brutish, and short. Stoicism was one popular response to brutal lives. Stoics taught that people who committed themselves to matters beyond their control such as wealth, health, careers, or lovers were set up for having bad fortune ruin their well-being. Better for people to redirect their efforts toward things that cannot be taken away, such as one’s freedom to think whatever one wants, one’s honor, and one’s sense of duty.

Christianity is certainly about personal freedom, honor, and a sense of duty. But Christianity adds the hope of triumph over death. Christians believe Jesus died for our sins, and will return, in Paul’s words, to “rescue us from the wrath that is coming” (I Thess 1:10). Jesus died for us, asking that we believe in him. If we believe, we will have eternal life. In exchange for faith, we get more than the Stoics’ sense of well-being.

Paul understood believers want instruction in how to live in faith. Paul offered that help. Most powerfully, he taught us how to love. Yet Paul believed in justification by faith, not works. We don’t love, we don’t do good, in order to get to heaven. Rather, by believing in Christ, by embracing an innocent, itinerant rabbi who sacrificed his life on a wooden cross—for Jews like Paul, the most degrading way one could die—to atone for our sins, we gain a faith that makes us want to reciprocate by becoming loving, giving individuals.

The Christian world is an alternate world, one where the weak become strong, where the poor come first, and where giving is greater than receiving. It is, however, a faith that is very much of this world. Believers live in the here and now. Belief, love—they work both on earth and for eternity.

Today, we know much more about how the human mind works than people did in Paul’s time. Yet there is so much we still don’t know. That means we’re still asked to take the same “leap of faith” Paul challenged us to make 2000 years ago.