From the Faith for the Faith: Pistis in Romans 1:17 and Habakkuk 2:4

 

'For the righteousness of God is revealed in it from the faith for the faith, as it is written: the righteous from the faith will live.'

 

Almost every verse in Romans is hotly debated, but this one is one of the few in Romans where just about every word is contested. The phrase ‘righteousness of God’ has, of course, received a lot of airtime, and then there is the very condense ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν, usually woodenly translated ‘from faith for faith’ (so the ESV) or opaquely translated ‘by faith from first to last’ (so the NIV).

Before I knew Greek, I still remember being puzzled by the terseness of this language as it was translated into English. I had no idea what it would mean for the righteousness of God to be revealed ‘from faith for faith’ or ‘by faith from first to last,’ and it certainly wasn’t clear to me how this was connected to the quote from Habakkuk 2:4.

As shown by my translation, we will suggest a different understanding of the noun πίστις in this verse, one that makes sense of both the odd phrase ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν and the Habakkuk quote. But let’s start our discussion with Origen who wrote the first full-length commentary on Romans and who happens to be a native speaker of Greek.

Although this meaning is listed in a standard dictionary like BDAG, it has been called into question in recent scholarship on the noun πίστις. Teresa Morgan's book, Roman Faith and Christian Faith, has been lauded as a "significant and magisterial study" and rightfully so. It is full of many valuable insights about how the word πίστις was used in the ancient world. For more on her work, you can check out our podcast episode The Meaning of πίστις (faith) in Paul with Teresa Morgan. While Morgan's work is a must-read, we do disagree on one significant point. Morgan suggests that this meaning of πίστις to refer to 'the faith' was absent at the time of Paul. Origen's understanding, she would maintain, is not an accurate reflection of what Paul meant but is a retrojection of what the term πίστις later came to mean. However, there are two reasons why this is probably not the case.

 

First, BDAG lists an example of the noun πίστις meaning 'the faith' from the first century BC from Diodorus Siculus's "Library of History." The use of πίστις occurs at the end of a section explaining the ancestry of Osiris, originally an Egyptian god, as a Greek god. Osiris is then identified as Dionysus. At the beginning of the story, the priests of Osiris claim that such a story was merely invented, even though it became very popular. Eventually, it says that even the theaters were filled with such a story, καὶ τοῖς ἐπιγινομένοις ἰσχρυρὰν πίστιν καὶ ἀμετάθετον γενέσθαι 'and to those who came after, the belief became strong and immutable.' In other words, the noun πίστις here refers to the 'belief' or 'faith' itself and not to the state of believing or having faith. This is exactly the kind of meaning that Origen gives to πίστις in his commentary on Romans 1:17, and the fact that it is found before Paul's time means that it would have been available to him to use as well.

 

The second reason why this meaning of πίστις was almost certainly operative during Paul's time is the nature of the noun itself. In her work, Morgan calls πίστις an action nominal, and I call πίστις a deverbal noun in my article "A Linguistic Analysis of πίστις χριστοῦ: The Case for the Third View", where I discuss these kinds of noun at length. Both "action nominal" and "deverbal noun" essentially refer to the same thing in linguistics, and one of the classic examples in English is the noun destruction. This noun can be used like its verbal counterpart, as we can see in the two parallel examples The brother destroyed the fort and The brother's destruction of the fort.

However, these nouns are also systematically ambiguous between referring to the event or state of the verb (as we see in The brother's destruction of the fort lasted all of 30 seconds) and the object that is connected to the event or state. So we can say something like The brother's sister was appalled at the destruction of the fort. In this kind of example, the sister sees the result of the brother's act and is appalled at it. In this case, the word destruction does not refer to the act of destroying but to the condition of the fort after the destruction has already happened.

This is called the referential use of deverbal nouns. It is the use that refers to something that is connected to the event or state of the verb. For our noun πίστις, this use would refer to the thing believed or the thing someone has faith in--the kind of meaning we already said that Origen attributes to πίστις in Romans 1:17 and the kind of meaning we saw attested in Diodorus Siculus's work. This is also the meaning argued for in The Jesus-Christ-Faith: Galatians 3:22 and The Pistis Christou Debate.