Believing Into Christ: Relational Faith and Human Flourishing

Abstract

Believing Into Christ uses very focused attention on a grammatical point of translation to open up an expansive Christian understanding of human flourishing. Natalya A. Cherry, Assistant Professor in Methodist Studies and Theology at Brite Divinity School, explains how a footnote to a World Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission document on the Faith of the Nicene Creed caught her attention because the Latin phrase it referenced (credere in deum) uses an unusual case for the noun with the verb ‘believe’. Using the work of Christine Mohrmann, she argues that because the phrase uses the preposition in plus the accusative case, it implies movement. The English would be better rendered ‘believe into’ rather than ‘believe in’. This phrasing is used not only of God (in deum) but also of Christ (in Christum), or sometimes simply ‘him’ (in eum). The unusual use of Latin replicates biblical Greek pisteuein eis.Once this grammatical point is established, Cherry argues that Augustine understood the significance of this construction and exploited it in his homilies. In her telling, Augustine was not above using bawdy references to convey to his listeners the intimacy of being incorporated into Christ. Augustine’s sermons also clearly distinguish different types of belief: believing Jesus is the Christ, believing what he says, and believing into him (the third being the faith that results in right relationship with God and distinguishes faith of Christians from the faith of demons). Cherry refers to this threefold understanding as Augustine’s ‘formula’.The faith that brings us ‘into’ Christ is far from an intellectual assent that many assume saving faith requires. In fact, part of the importance of Augustine’s ‘formula’ is to show the contrast between ‘believing into’ and the other two ways of believing. It is when we give ourselves to be incorporated into Christ (deification or theosis) that we flourish with the spiritual health and wholeness that God intends for us. Cherry’s description of this incorporation stresses body and movement: our limbs are ‘glued’ to Christ’s limbs and therefore we move as he moves in order to express his love bodily in the world. This image expresses faith working by love.Cherry then outlines how the explicit link that Augustine made between a specific kind of faith and human flourishing faded over time as theologians avoided the bodily image of incorporation and instead systematized Augustine’s threefold formula conceptually. Although theologians could still connect faith and love, the contrast between ‘believe into’ and the other two types of faith in the formula was minimized as all three were stressed as positive aspects of faith. Cherry hopes that renewed attention to Augustine’s emphasis could nourish constructive theological understanding of what it is to be Christlike in daily living.The book is not specifically about Wesley or Methodist studies, but it does mention Methodism in a way that should be noted. Because of the fading influence of Augustine’s formula, Cherry laments that vital movements such as Methodism did not have available to them the understanding of ‘believing-into’ that Augustine preached. She does note that a Methodist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Edward H. Sugden, understood from biblical Greek the point about believing into Christ. In a footnote to John Wesley’s sermon ‘The First Fruits of the Spirit’, Sugden referred to the Greek pisteuein eis from the Gospel of John as ‘believing into’ in order to illumine what Wesley missed about Paul’s phrase ‘in Christ’ in the text for this sermon (Romans 8:1). Cherry interprets Sugden’s comment to mean ‘that Wesley’s early theology had yet to consider faith in relational, rather than merely transactional, terms’. It should be acknowledged, though, that as early as 1738 (in ‘Salvation by Faith’) Wesley distinguished right, living faith from the faith of the devils and talked about it in terms of trust and confidence.It is not clear to me that Sugden’s footnote intended to comment that Wesley’s early theology of faith was not relational but rather to make a point about the distinction between justification and sanctification. Sanctification is more clearly how we grow into Christ—what Sugden thinks Paul means by ‘in Christ’. Sugden points out that Paul uses believe upon (epi) for justification and believe into (eis) for sanctification.My own sense as I read Cherry’s book was how much Wesley and Augustine had in common in the way they called people to Christlikeness. They may well have come to their understandings differently—and perhaps used different images—but they offered a similar vision for Christian living. I hope Wesleyan Methodist readers will make use of this book to highlight the wisdom that is in this tradition and recover it.