Canter Bridge

The apostle Paul’s comprehension of grace is supported by a complex reading of the patriarchal narratives. Abraham figures both as the protagonist of the story and the paradigmatic ‘first believer’. For Paul, the redemptive drama begins nearly two thousand years before Christ and extends into his own time. Continuity is provided by the nature of human faith, which is the same throughout the story.

That is, Abraham’s faith and faith in Jesus are cut from the same cloth. This faith is the human instrument that appropriates the generosity of God towards receptive humankind.

Paul’s reading of the patriarchal material is constitutional for Christian faith, though considered tendentious and unpersuasive by Jewish thinkers like Harvard’s Jon Levenson. It pivots on a chronological datum. The key for Paul is that the Genesis passages that deal with Abraham’s belief in God’s promises to him describe what Christians would come to call his ‘justification by faith’ before they narrate his own circumcision.

In the apostle’s understanding, this establishes circumcision as a more or less optional response to the belief-justification dynamic. Therefore, in his day, justification before and by God is available to those who have been circumcised and to those who have not. Abraham is equally the father of both. He is not the ‘father of the Jews’ so much as he is the father of all who trust in God as he did.

Faith is therefore the common element in a long redemptive drama of which its twists and turns might well be distracting and plot-burying. Faith holds things together.