Shane Williamson’s Reviews > Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches > Status Update

Since, for Paul, God is pistos and practises pistis towards human beings, and Christ is the Son of God and Lord, it is no great stretch to see Christ as exercising pistis toward human beings too. (289-90)

Pistis, as we have seen, is often associated with obedience and the language of service, and 'the obedience of pistis' is best read as a genitive of apposition, referring to Paul's sense that the pistis into which he brings gentiles is, like his own, a relationship of slavish obedience to Christ. (282-83)

"Given...that pistis, in linguistic terms, is an action nominal, encompassing both active and passive meanings of its cognate verb (such that, for instance, both 'trust' and 'trustworthiness', 'credit' and 'credibility' are always implicated in it)...it is surprising that pistis Christou has not been understood more often as simultaneously Christ's faithfulness to God and human faith in Christ." (273)

Christ is therefore at the centre of a nexus of divine- human pistis. His pistis is simultaneously his faithfulness or trustworthiness towards both God and humanity, and his trustedness by both God and humanity. (272)

"If followers of Christ had begun, as early as the first century, to refer to their relationship with God, opinions, and practices as 'the faith' in anything resembling the modern sense of a religion, they would have created (in an extremely short period of time) not only a new cult, but a new cultural concept. This, of course, is not impossible, but it is a very large claim..." (265)

Paul's main interest is in pistis as relationship-forming and power-mediating. As such, he sees pistis is dominantly an exercise of trust which involves heart, mind, and action. (261)

I shall argue that the focus of both intra-human and divine-human pistis/fides, Graeco-Roman and Christian, is more often than not on relationality, and that even in Christian thinking, propositionality is often less important than has often been assumed. (30)

New communities forming themselves within an existing culture do not typically take language in common use in the world around them and immediately assign to it radical new meanings...This is all the more likely to be the case where the new community is a missionary one. One does not communicate effectively with potential converts by using language in a way which they will not understand. (4)