B (4:42)

It's a fascinating finding that trust was central to this understanding of the meaning of faith. So pistis and fides, what were these words used before Christians? Faith, like, what other connotations did they have?

C (4:59)

How are they used? Yeah, well, like trust language today, they're everywhere in society. So they're used of the trust between family members, which is regarded as very strong. It's very positively viewed in the ancient world. Also used as a trust between friends, which is regarded in the world of the first century, say where Christianity developed. It's trust between friends is regarded as highly desirable, but quite difficult. You have to a little bit test your friends, you have to be a little bit wary. But when you have a friend you can trust, you should stick to them like anything. It's used in commercial contexts of making contracts and covenants. It's used in political contexts. Of course, there is a lot of worry in the world of the first century about the trustworthiness of rulers and especially of emperors. Emperors are generally regarded as not very trustworthy, and that is regarded as a problem. There's also A lot of interesting discussion about whether you can trust the gods. And the world into which Christianity was born, as it were, is a world, as far as we can tell, with very few atheists. We hear almost nothing about atheism. Almost everybody just took for granted that the gods exist, the gods of Olympus, all the gods of the ancient world. But there was a lot of debate about whether you could trust them. So they were there, but they were often probably not trustworthy. And it's one of the big differences between mainstream polytheism, as it were, in that world, and Judaism and Christianity that for Jews and Christians, God is absolutely trustworthy. And that's a huge new thing, really, in that world. So all those are the areas where this disinflated language operates. And one of the fascinating things about it is that whether you can trust people in different contexts varies so much. So, you know, family trust is strong. Commercial context, trust is fairly strong, political context, not so much, Divine context, not so much. And one of the things that comes to be distinctive about Christian trust is where it operates. And for Christians, God is absolutely trustworthy. Christ is absolutely trustworthy. And then Christians need to be trustworthy to each other too. So Christianity, like Judaism, places a very high value on trust in every context, really.

B (7:27)

I'm imagining what it was like to be a pagan believer, you tell me. But they didn't see Zeus and the other pantheon gods as family members, but they. They did start to think of the Christian God the father as, you know, a. A loving father, that they were children of God in some ways. Is that right?

C (7:53)

Yeah, I think that's a very good point. Greeks and Romans could refer to Father Zeus or Father Jupiter, you do get that language, but it's not incredibly common. And it doesn't really seem to mean the same thing to Greeks or Romans as God the Father comes to mean to Christians. It is a more distant, a more authoritarian relationship, you know, one of regulation and punishment rather than of love, really. And you're absolutely right that the use of real kind of family language and loving family language of God and of Christ and of the faithful among Christians and among Jews is very distinctive. And it's. And language of God as father is significantly more common among Christians even than Jews. It isn't. It's an idea that's there in the Hebrew Bible in Jewish tradition, but Christians make much more of it. And I think you're absolutely right. Right. That one of the reasons why trust is so such a strong theme for Christians is that they think in these family terms and they're very unusual in calling other members of the community brother and sister as well, you know, so that family language really goes alongside the language of trust. And I'd like to say at this point, actually, about the relationship between trust and belief, because this is important to me. Nowadays, when we talk about Christian faith, we think a lot about things that we believe, you know, articles of the creed or things that we're asked to believe, believe about God, about Christ. Early Christians believed things. Of course they did, for sure. They believed things about God and about Christ and about the crucifixion, the resurrection, about salvation, about ultimate hope, the hope of heaven, of salvation at the end time. They believed a lot of things. But for very early Christians, belief is the basis the trust. And the thing that gets you into your relationship with God and keeps you there is the relational trust. So the belief is the foundation, but the trust is the thing that kind of gets you into the community of the saved and. And keeps you there. So that's the relationship between the two. And it's worth saying that I think up front, because for many Christians now, belief is so obviously part of faith.

B (10:08)

When did belief, or a kind of cognitive ascent to concepts and ideas, begin to take primary meaning of the word faith?

C (10:22)

Yeah, it's a really, really interesting development this. And it really happens between somewhere around the end of the first century and the Council of Nicaea in 325. And we can give it quite a definite date for the moment when, as it were, belief becomes officially central to Christianity. Because the Nicene Creed that was developed at the Council of Nicaea is the first ever instrument created by Christians that the whole of the Church was supposed to sign up to, which was created to test whether somebody was a legitimate member of the Church based on what they believed. So it was. It was developed to test for heresy. It wasn't used liturgically. The Nicene Creed, which many Christians use liturgically now, was not used liturgically for over 100 years. That's not what it was for. It was a test of orthodoxy. And that is the first moment when really believing defines you as a Christian, officially defines you as a Christian. But the path to get there is a very interesting one. I think it has something to do with the fact that Christians found themselves being attacked by outsiders a lot. So through the second and third centuries, Christians spent a lot of energy defending themselves against outsiders who thought their ideas were ridiculous or that they were vulgar or immoral or whatever. And so early Christian apologists spent a lot of time saying, actually what we Think about God. What we think about Christ is not irrational or ridiculous or just stupid or ignorant. It is, well, for a start, true, you know, they said, but also it's carefully thought out. It's sophisticated, it makes sense. It holds together. It's reasonable, you know, and. And by defending Christianity as reasonable, Christians came to talking a lot more about belief, you know, and so belief became gained in profile, as it were, alongside arguments with outsiders. Of course, Christians also had a lot of debates among themselves because the nature of God, the nature of Christ, and is Christ entirely human or entirely divine or something of both. And if something of both, in what way something of both. You know, all of those debates which were very important to early Christians, they encourage people to talk about, well, I believe that this is true, and you believe that something else is true, you know, so belief language just kind of. It becomes more important in all these debates. And another part of this, the other most important part of this, I think, is a sort of accident that. Because it just happens that Platonists, Platonist philosophers, as it happens, use pistis language in a very particular way to refer to beliefs that we can draw from this world about the gods. And so Platonists used pistis language, which most people used, to mean trust at the time, to mean belief, in its rather minority sense, to mean belief. And it just so happened that some of the most influential early Christian theologians were Platonists. And so they adopted this Platonist use of pistis meaning belief, rather than meaning trust. So all those things together, an unusual philosophical use of business language to mean belief. And debates among Christians about what it was right to think and therefore believe, about God, about Christ, and debates between Christians and outsiders about Christianity being reasonable, believable, you know, all of those things, I think, gradually encouraged Christians to think about their faith more in terms of belief. And the seal was really set on that at the Council of Nicaea. And since then, really, belief has been really central to Christians.

B (14:11)

What do you think is lost when we lose this original sense of pistis?

C (14:17)

Yeah, it's a really good question. I think what we lose is that sense of. Of relationship with God, that it's. It's. That it is our relationship, it's our family relationship with God and with Christ that is central to our faith, and that's a relationship that we give the whole of ourselves to. It's not just a mental, a cognitive thing. It's about your heart and your soul and your strength, as well as your mind, as it were. And when you. When you focus on belief, it can be just a little bit easy to think. It's about what you think thinking the right thing. And of course, I mean, I think what is very interesting about Christianity is that if you ask, you know, the average Christian who goes to church on a Sunday, say, I think they will always. They have always said, and they do still say trust is very important, faithfulness is important. You know, they do actually think in terms of relationship. It's kind of the theologians who've forgotten about trust, in a way, the ordinary Christians still, trust still makes sense to them. The idea that God is faithful still makes sense to them. So they, they do instinctively. We do all instinctively think, but theologians have just a little bit forgotten about that and have got a bit hung up on the belief thing. Not that I'm against theologians, but I just think they're not quite right about this. But it's the sense that, you know, a relationship is a whole life thing, you know, and it's about how you feel and how you live and how all those things hang together with what you think and what you believe. And I think that's what I want to recapture for the tradition by writing about trust and faithfulness and entrustedness and trustworthiness.

B (15:56)

Actually, I was hoping to come back to this word, entrustedness, which is. It is unique and beautiful. Tell me how you think about entrustedness.

C (16:05)

Yeah, well, this is a very interesting thing. There's actually quite a bit of language of entrustedness in the New Testament, which we don't really take very much notice of. But think, for instance about the parable of the talents, where the master goes away and before he does, he gives three of his servants, his trusted stewards. You know, one gets 10 talents and one gets five and one gets one. No, that's wrong. One gets five, one gets two and one gets one. Let's get the story right, okay? One gets five and ends up with 10 and one gets two and ends up with four, and one gets one and buries it, okay? The, the two good servants who multiply their talents are described as pistos, trustworthy. And the one who to just bury it, his talent is not trustworthy and he's cast out. So what's happened here is that all three of these have been entrusted with something with a kind of stewardship by their master. And two of them come through and are praised for being trustworthy and one doesn't. So the language of being entrusted with something goes very well with the language of stewardship we find especially in end time parables in the synoptic Gospels, that's a really good place. But we find it too in the epistles. Paul in 1 Thessalonians describes himself as entrusted by God with preaching the Gospel. And so Paul uses entrustedness language of himself in a couple of places. And he thinks of himself especially entrusted with preaching, of course, because that's sort of his key thing. We also hear in two Timothy, we hear the writer tell his audience, guard this rich trust that you have been given, you know, which is the teaching of the Gospel, you know, again, so it's something they have been entrusted with and that is, therefore has become a trust form, as it were. So, so in New Testament writings, people are entrusted with different things, with preaching, with healing. It's language which parallels the language of gifts of the Spirit, really, some people with leadership. In later Christian writings, we hear a lot about being entrusted with leadership. It's a word which is used a lot of bishops and presbyters and deacons, people in leadership positions, that it's not something that they're given to do what they like with. You know, it might be a gift to the Spirit, but it's a trust from the Spirit as well. It's something they're entrusted with to carry out as stewards, as it were. So that's the sort of thing that this language means, I think.

B (18:38)

So we. We are taught that we can trust fully in God and we strive to live worthy of the trust that God places in us.

C (18:47)

Yeah, part of the sort of theological logic of this language, I think, is that God trusts us. And God is often said to be faithful in the Septuagint and several times in the New Testament. And part of God's faithfulness to us, I think, is that God trusts us. And I would say God trusts us, for instance, by sending Jesus into the world to build a bridge, as it were, between God and an alienated humanity. God trusts us to recognize Jesus, to recognize God with us in Jesus Christ, which is a big act of trust when you think about it, because God could have kind of done what prophet Zachariah prophesied and stood on the Mount of Olives in a blaze of glory and say, okay, this is the deal. But God doesn't do that. He sends Jesus Christ, a human being, to Nazareth to preach and heal and hope that people get that this is the Son of God. It's a very fascinating model, but it is a great act of trust by God, I think. And Jesus similarly has to trust that people will hear him. So there's trust from God's side as well. As from ours in this relationship, which again, is what you would hope for and expect in a family kind of relationship. You know, it makes sense in a family context. All members of the family trust each other. And that's very much the Christian model, I think.

B (20:10)

How does pistis make sense of the atonement? How did Christians think about trust and the passion?

C (20:19)

Yeah, well, this is something that I've been thinking about recently, and I think one has to say as a starting point that different books of the New Testament vary in this respect in whether they connect trust language very strongly with the Passion narrative and the Passion preaching. And the person who connects them most strongly is Paul, particularly in Romans and Galatians and Philippians in his three great passages where he tries to explain what God has done through Christ, through the crucifixion. And in all of those passages, he refers to our trust in Christ, but also pistis christu, a Greek, notorious Greek phrase which may mean the trust that we have in Christ or may mean the trust or faithfulness that Christ has towards God. Or a bit of both. I think it means a bit of both. I think it means the trust relationship between Christ and God and the trust relationship between Christ and us. And I would connect that in Paul's writings. I connect that with Paul's language of Jesus as reconciler. So Paul likes this language of reconciliation. Jesus, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself in 2 Corinthians 5. And I think that the language of trust in relation to the atonement is closely related to this language of Jesus as reconciler, as mediator, you know, because that's. Mediators are axiomatically pissed off, axiomatically trusting and trustworthy to everybody concerned in the ancient world in general. And so when Jesus is mediator, he can mediate between us and God precisely because there's this trust relationship between him and God and a trust relationship between him and us. So the way that I think that Paul understands trust language in the atonement is that somehow by this double relationship of trust, Jesus is able to mediate between us and God and bring us back together. And I would connect with that another sort of piece of very quite unusual language that Paul uses. And that's language of being with. He talks about us being crucified with Christ and in the future being raised with Christ and living with Christ. I think that for Paul, we die and we live with Christ and Christ is the ascended and glorified. Christ is with us all the time that we are doing that and that too is a relationship of trust. Paul talks a lot about the trust that we put in Christ, but by implication too, the trust that Christ puts in us. And so all the time that we're going through this process of dying to sin and living in newness of life, we do it in a relationship of trust with Christ. And that's partly why we can do it, because Christ is with us and we go along with him and we trust him in the process. And the process of dying to sin, of rising to a completely new life, you know, a new creation, it's a huge, completely life changing, potentially terrifying thing. But we go through it in trust with Christ alongside us. And so that's how I envisage the trust aspect, as it were, of the atonement.

B (23:41)

Beautiful framing and beautiful way to think about Christ's suffering for us. Latter Day Saints heavily emphasize the idea of covenants that we can enter into sacred promises with God where we promise to obey and to follow the commandments and to live certain ways. And in return, we receive promises from God that we can absolutely trust. What has been your engagement with the idea of covenant? How do you think about covenants and trust?

C (24:16)

Well, as you will know very well, of course, the book of the New Testament that talks most about covenant is Hebrews. And that is a book which also has a lot of trust language in it, you know, so the two things really go together for the author of Hebrews in a very clear way. But also, of course, trust language appears throughout the Gospels where the new covenant in the blood of Jesus is explicitly referenced in the Synoptic Gospels. And it's also, as we've just been saying, a big theme for Paul, for whom the new covenant is also central to what is happening through the crucifixion. The thing about covenants, I suppose, is that you can imagine them kind of on a spectrum from a sort of informal covenant that is very much rooted in a strong relationship to something which is very legal and rather formal and doesn't necessarily depend on a lot of existing trust. And there is quite a lot of recent scholarship on covenants in the ancient Near Eastern world and how the language of those covenants works as a model for the language of covenant in the book of Deuteronomy, say. And the trouble with that, I think, is that it can make the covenant between God and his people sound a bit political, a bit kind of functional, really. And that is not how we think about covenant as Christians at all. We think about it as something loving, as something generous, as something Intensely relational as something that we live, we joyously live within, as it were. When we think that the covenant that we enter with God, that God offers us and that we enter with God goes alongside our act of trusting God. So in a sense, we can trust God because God offers us the covenant, and we can accept the covenant because God offers us trust. They go together and they feed off each other, they support each other. So I think that thinking about trust as part of the whole relationship that creates and sustains the covenant, it just reminds us how relational that is. It's not about politics, it's about saving relationship. I don't know whether that resonates with you or not.

B (26:31)

It does. And we have a lot of expectations and sacramental steps to take as latter saints to help us in our growth towards the divine. But invariably those can sometimes feel like a checklist to earn heaven rather than as growing invitations to enter into deeper and more loving relationship with our Father. And so I think it's important to always be reminded that God is. God is drawing us towards him in love. And it is not about earning something and judgment. I think those are temptations. But it's absolutely in family, love and trust that we are. We are invited into that divine participation.

C (27:21)

I would certainly resonate with that way of looking at it. Yeah.

B (27:26)

You're working on a new book, the Invention of Faith. What a great, what a great title.

C (27:31)

Well, it won't end up. It won't end up being called that. I called it that when I was applying for a grant to get some research leave to write it.

B (27:40)

Very critical, very smart.

C (27:42)

I thought it was the kind of title that grant givers would like. But. But of course, faith is not invented. You know, nobody who is a person of faith thinks that faith is invented at the beginning of the tradition or at any point in the tradition. So it'll be called in the end, something like Faith in the Making, I think. But it is about how Christian faith became a wider and a richer concept between the sort of second century of the Common era and the fifth century. Because I think by the fifth century, pretty much all the aspects of faith that we would think of now are part of Christian faith. So, for instance, belief, as we've been talking about belief, has become more important. But also practicing your faith by going to church, that is really a new thing, a new idea. In the 4th century, the idea that personal, interior faith, your interior journey of faith might be really central. That's something which really develops a lot in the second and the third century. The idea of the leap of faith. You know, that faith is a risk, that you don't take it blindly, but there's always an element of risk in putting your trust in somebody, in having faith. That's an idea that really comes in from the third century onwards. So there are all sorts of sort of aspects of faith that grow through this period. So that's the story that I'm tracing at the moment. Yes.

B (29:10)

As you survey Christian history, do you see any particular individuals or communities that were instinctively seeking a greater pistis expression of faith against maybe a slightly more legalistic, you know, belief approach?

C (29:33)

That's such an interesting question. My suspicion is that the Christians who have had the firmest grasp on the importance of trust and faithfulness and entrustedness have probably always been the ordinary Christians, as it were, not the archbishops and the bishops of the early church and not the theologians who are very fascinated by ideas, you know, and I admit to that, too. But I think it's not an accident that the early Christians name for themselves was the faithful. And I think it's the faithful, the ordinary faithful, as it were, who have always had the greatest grasp on the trust and the faithfulness aspect of this. And you can see it a little bit in sermons, in ancient Christian sermons, early sermons, where preachers talk to, you know, ordinary people standing in the name of the Church, as they would have done at that date, you know, about how important it is to. To be faithful, to act with faithfulness, not just to believe the right things, but actually it really matters what you do and how you love your neighbor and how you care for your neighbor and that kind of thing. Part of my suspicion that it has always been, as it were, ordinary Christians who had the strongest grasp on trust and faithfulness is because I really see it in my congregations now. I belong to a church that recites the Nicene Creed pretty much every Sunday as part of a main Sunday service. Not everybody does, of course, but my tradition does. And many of my congregation members, they know that the Nicene Creed is a historical document. They know that it was created in very specific circumstances. They know there's a backstory to all the clauses. They know it's technical, and they know they don't really know how it's technical, you know, and so people will come to me and say, I. I don't really understand it. I don't really know whether I ought to say the Creed, because I know I don't really understand it. And I'm not sure whether I do believe in the Virgin Birth. I'm not sure, you know, I, I don't know quite what I believe about begotten, not made, you know, and you've got to sympathize with that because it is technical, you know, But I often say to people, then, okay, would you say that you put your trust in God? You put your trust in Christ? And people say, oh, yeah, I would say that. You know, and, and I say, well, would you say that you are trying to live in a way that is faithful to Christ, you're trying to follow Christ faithfully, and people, everyone will say, oh, yes, that's why I'm here. Absolutely, you know, and I think if you, if, if you're doing those things, you're probably okay, you know, don't worry too much about the technicalities. So I think it is, it's, you know, it's, it's. I suspect it's all always been a bit true that ordinary Christians are the ones who have kept the trust, as it were.

B (32:29)

I suspect you're exactly right. How have you balanced faith and reason? You've taught at some of the great universities in the Western world. Faith has been embattled in the west, or at least belief has been embattled. How have you found a way to live faithfully and use your gift of reason?

C (32:56)

Yeah, well, as you know, this is a question which is always coming up in divinity schools. It's a question my students ask on a regular basis. For myself, I have never felt it to be a problem, and I think that is really just because in some ways I feel very fortunate. But I've just my whole life had such an overwhelming sense of the presence of God, really. It just seems to me to open your eyes and look at the world and listen to the world around you. It, to me, it just speaks of a universe full of the divine, and it always has. And so all my intellectual exploring is just excited and joyful and fascinated. Ways of trying to understand God better. Now, that's kind of easy if you always have a strong sense of God. But I have many friends and many students who struggle with that sense. We don't always have, and it is well documented of a great many saints, of theologians, of people of great faith, of great faith in action, that they do often struggle with the dark night of the soul, with the sense of the absence of God, or of not hearing God. And then I can see that you might worry that your thinking might lead you astray. I guess thinking might always lead us astray, but then I suppose either we hang on to our own sense of the divine, or we hang on to our corporate sense of the divine. I mean, I think one of the incredibly important things about Christian tradition and Christian community is that we hold our faith for each other. And in the days when we struggle or we wobble or we can't hear God, or we can't feel God, then we know that there are people around us who do still hear and feel and see the presence of God. And we hold that faith for each other. We hold that trust for each other, really. And people through 2000 years of Christian history have held it for us and handed it on to us. So if you have a strong sense of the presence of God, then all you're exploring, you can't break God. You're not going to break. I say to students occasionally, you're not going to break God. Explore. Everything that we do is just exploring the wonder of what God has given to us, you know, but if there are days when you can't feel that, then put your trust in the people around you and the tradition which feels that for you, you know, and hang on to that. Hang on to what we're taught, what we're taught to do, what we see the people around us doing, you know, until perhaps you get your direct sense of the presence of God back again. But I think. I think for those of us who believe in God, who trust in God, we're not going to brave God. All our exploring is just, you know, dancing on the breath of God, really.

B (36:16)

So beautifully stated. And my biggest aspiration with life is to be there for my brothers and sisters when they are wobbling and to be a strength. I think my final question today would be, have you had a personal experience that you might be willing to share that helped you really feel that sense of trust with God that taught you Pistis deep in your bones?

C (36:49)

Yes, but I'll talk about one. I think probably all sorts of things over the years in different ways, but I'll tell you about one, because it's really also to do with my own kind of academic journey and professional journey, as well as my faith. So I felt, I guess, a call to ordination, to ministry from perhaps my late teenage years, my undergraduate years, something like that. And for about. For well over a decade, I didn't do anything about it. I wasn't sure why. You know, I wanted to understand why I felt. A call. This is a waste of time. To all of your podcast listeners, a call is a call. You never know why. You don't know why. Don't spend 10 years trying to work it out, it's not worth it. But anyway, I wanted to know why I felt a call and if I didn't understand why, then I wasn't going to do anything about it. I was suspicious of my motives. So I didn't do anything about it until there came a time, as there does for many people, when I just really couldn't hold out longer. I just felt a call. I came around to thinking a call is a call and I don't understand it, but it's there and so I'm going to respond to it. Okay, so eventually I did that. So I did my theology degree and I did my ordination training and was ordained and was a curate in a parish in my early years of teaching Greek and Roman history in Oxford. And I found this. It was very pressurized, it was busy, you know, and I was really conscious in those years that by answering the call, by taking up the study of theology, which is a big extra thing, you know, I was kind of putting on hold my academic career and I thought I had a nice little job and a nice little career going as a classicist. It was all going fine, you know, I was writing books and it was great and it would. That was being completely disrupted by answering this call to study theology. And there was a. In the middle of my ordination training, I had a sort of middle course assessment with a panel of people. And I disgraced myself by spending the entire time in tears because I just felt I was throwing away my life as a classicist for nothing, really. For not knowing what, if anything, would come of it, you know, really, because I always wanted to work for the church part time and unpaid, which is what I've always done, you know, so it wasn't like I was going to go off and become a bishop or something. I didn't have a career in the church, you know, to hope for at all. I was just going to serve God in a very humble capacity, which is what I tried to do. And, and at the same time, it was going to ruin my career. I was really depressed about this, but I just found I had to do it. So I kind of got on with it and. But, but in fact, what has happened is that that path has led to extraordinary opportunities and extraordinary reaches. Really. It's the path that has brought me to teach at Yale, to teach, you know, in a divinity school, to write about the New Testament and about theology. And it has been more fulfilling than I could have dreamed. And that was. There was a real act of trust about that in the early years, and I did not think it was going to end well. I just thought I had to do it anyway. And that trust has been vindicated, you know, a thousandfold, in my experience. Really. I feel so much richer and more fortunate now than I did 25 years ago, I guess. Yeah. So it's amazing how, you know, throwing everything into your trust in God might work out, I guess,

B (40:30)

and really relate to that. I also feel that God led me to the work that I'm doing today, could never have quite predicted how it would unfold. Professor Morgan, thank you so much for sharing your gifts and knowledge today with us. It's been such a joy.

C (40:45)

Thank you very much. It's been absolutely great to talk to you.

B (40:49)

All right.

D (40:50)

Thanks so much for listening. We really hope that you enjoyed this conversation with Theresa Morgan and Zach Davis. I also want to mention that this interview is featured in the upcoming issue 7 of Wayfair magazine. This is a special edition that centers women's voices on the theme of trust, trust in God, in ourselves and in our communities. It's a beautiful and thoughtful collection that we are so proud of. If you'd like to receive your own copy of Wayfair in the mail, you can become a friend of Faith Matters or sign up as a paid subscriber@wayfairmagazine.org thanks again for listening.