From ancient times, Christians have believed in Jesus the Christ, Jesus Messiah, the one who freed Israel from bondage. Trust in Jesus the Divine Messiah has always characterized the heart of Christian faith. I argued this – successfully, I hope – in my previous post.

But Christians have also always proclaimed that this Jesus is a different sort of Messiah – not the great politician and warrior once hoped for, but one come in worldly weakness to die for us all, both Jew and Gentile.

This Messiah’s weakness by worldly standards is coupled with a great strength by spiritual standards. Unlike the classical Jewish Messiah, He sits at the right hand of the Father – meaning that He is one with the authority of God, and therefore (according to Jewish thought) one who participates in God’s very identity.

Jesus is a sort of cosmic Messiah, one with Divine authority, who has come to liberate us from spiritual imprisonment through weakness and self-sacrifice. This, to a significant degree, forms the heart of Christian faith-experience.

Now, all of this does not immediately lead us to Nicene Orthodoxy. Jesus’ identification with – and participation in – the power of God does not necessarily make Him God incarnate.

Yet this faith of Nicaea – and indeed the whole of Christian orthodoxy – comes, I believe, from the fundamental experience of the risen Messiah, of God’s power in Jesus of Nazareth. This experience of God’s power in Jesus Messiah is what I will examine in this post.

PAUL AND JESUS MESSIAH

So what exactly constitutes this power? What is its character? To answer this, I want to look briefly at Paul. I’d think this is useful for two reasons. First, because Paul is not so much a dogmatist as he is a missionary, pastor and theologian – and he is articulating the life of faith from his immediate experience (plus reports of Jesus’ teachings from other apostles).

Second, Paul’s letters are generally considered our earliest extant documents of the Christian church. “The inconvenient truth [for skeptics and revisionists] is that nearly all scholars identify the letters of Saint Paul as the oldest extant Christian documents, the earliest dating from the 50s AD, two decades after the crucifixion” (Ross Douthat, Bad Religion, 164). For this reason, and because the Christian community, from ancient times, has believed that God Himself spoke through Paul in these letters, it seems reasonable to go here for an expression of basic, primordial Christian faith. After all, where else would we go?

As soon as we do this, we find that Paul’s faith is fundamentally Messianic. Complex though Paul’s articulation of faith may be, its heart is simple: Paul’s is a faith in Jesus Messiah. I take this very particular way of expressing the Name – “Jesus Messiah” – from the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s book The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans.

In this book, a 150-page commentary on the first ten words (!) of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Agamben makes the case that Paul’s expression pisteuein eis Iesoun christen (literally “to believe in Jesus Messiah”), which he uses everywhere in his letters (with the one exception of Romans 10:9), is in fact a highly unique piece of grammar.

“This expression, which in the Latin translation became the canonical expression of faith, is an anomaly in Greek. Pisteuō is normally constructed with the dative, or with the accusative, or even with hoti plus a verb, in order to convey the content of faith” (Agamben 127). Yet this phrase is entirely in the nominative case.

What is the significance of this? It means, effectively, that there is no grammatically distinguished object or content which pisteuō references. This is not belief in a content, Jesus; rather, to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther’s 1535 Commentary on Galatians, “Christ is the form of faith [my emphasis].” As Agamben puts it: “He [Paul] does not know that Jesus is the Messiah, he only knows Jesus Messiah. (This is how a misunderstanding could emerge later on that allowed for the syntagma Iēsous christos to be taken as proper name.)” (127).

Paul, of course, believes in the historical reality of Jesus, the crucifixion, and the resurrection; Agamben is not psychologizing the faith here (and neither is Luther!). The point is this: that Paul feels Christ too closely to regard him as a separate datum; nor can he separate Jesus’ Messiahship from His person. This is the upshot of Agamben’s grammatical analysis, which I give in the next section. This argument is helpful, but not necessary to know. The reader may skip it if they want!

NOMINAL SYNTAGMA: A GRAMMATICAL ARGUMENT

Iēsous christos, Agamben claims, is a nominal syntagma. This specific notion is Agamben’s own, but it is built from two already-established grammatical ideas.

First, the syntagma is a sequence of words related to one another by way of a single syntactic (that is, grammatical) rule. According to Agamben, the sequence Iēsous christos forms a single linguistic unit in which both words are related by their nominative case.

The nominal sentence is the second established idea. We run into the nominal sentence fairly often in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic – but not so much in English. Because it does not happen much in our own language (and because we do not have the noun declensions to signify whether a word is in the nominative, accusative, dative or genitive), this notion might be a little harder for us to comprehend.

But it should not be too hard: we need only remember that the nominative case generally denotes the subject of a sentence; the accusative denotes the direct object of a verb; the dative denotes the indirect object of a verb; and the genitive denotes an object’s being-possessed by the subject, direct object or indirect object.

In general, you need at least a subject, a verb, and some sort of object to make a complete sentence. Therefore you need at least two cases in your sentence (since verbs have tenses – past, present, future, etc. – rather than cases).

A nominal sentence, however, semantically “expresses a complete assertion but does not contain a verbal predicate” (Agamben 127). Agamben cites two examples in Pindar which are usually covered up in translation: the sentence “man is the dream of a shadow” – which, literally in the Greek, reads “from a dream the shade the man;” and “best is water” – which, literally in the Greek, reads “best the water” (Agamben 127).

The coverups in these Pindar translations reveal something important about the older, common way that scholars used to understand nominal sentences. They were thought to function effectively like regular clauses with a copula (“is”) missing.

However, according to Agamben, this consensus has changed, with figures like Meillet and Benveniste leading the way. As Benveniste says: “The nominal sentence and the sentence with esti [is] do not make assertions in the same way and do not belong on the same plane. The first is from discourse; the second, from narration. The one establishes an absolute; the other describes a situation” (Agamben 127-8).

Agamben does not go on to clarify Benveniste’s statement, but from what follows, I think I can surmise the ultimate meaning. The nominal sentence belongs to “discourse” insofar as it does not say something about something, but rather utters the thing and its quality together, in a single moment of speech. And it “establishes an absolute” insofar as it identifies something with its quality, so much so that the thing in question is unthinkable without it.

So Jesus’ Messiahship is inseparable from Him – in fact, it is not even really a quality. Instead, it is the heart of who Jesus is for Paul – He is the one who immediately shows up as Messiah.

THE EXPERIENCE OF FAITH

What does all of this mean for Paul’s text? It means that Jesus is the one who immediately shows up as Messiah. Agamben says it well:

Paul does not believe that Jesus possesses the quality of being the Messiah; he believes in “Jesus Messiah” and that is all. Messiah is not a predicate tacked onto the subject Jesus, but something that is inseparable from him, without, however, constituting a proper name. For Paul, this is faith; it is an experience of being beyond existence and essence, as much beyond subject as beyond predicate. (Agamben 128).

Paul does not believe in Jesus who is the Messiah, but rather in Jesus Messiah, the Holy One of Israel. Of course, if he could step back for a moment, Paul would affirm that Jesus is indeed the one who is the Messiah – but this, according to Agamben, is to step outside of faith (if only for a moment).

Agamben illustrates this by comparing faith to love. Again he writes:

But isn’t this precisely what happens in love? Love does not allow for copulative predication, it never has a quality or an essence as its object. “I love beautiful-brunette-tender Mary,” not “I love Mary because she is beautiful, brunette, tender,” in the sense of her possessing such and such an attribute. The moment when I realize that my beloved has such-and-such a defect, then I have irrevocably stepped out of love, even if, as is often the case, I continue to believe that I love her, especially after having given good reason for continuing to do so. Love has no reason, and this is why, in Paul, it is tightly interwoven with faith. (Agamben 128).

You might notice that Agamben says this stepping out of love and/or faith is irrevocable. I would critique Agamben here; I think his concept of love is too romantic. In any long-term relationship, in any love that lasts years, I must at some point reflect on why, during the hard and trying times, it is worth staying with my beloved. And I must stay with them despite certain defects on their part that do show up to my consciousness.

In the same way, when challenged to articulate my beliefs, I must do so. Agamben seems to want to suggest that creedal statements are antithetical to faith; I don’t agree. They are reflections born from faith, when faith meets new challenges and must articulate what it has held to be true in its life and practice. Moreover, the great confessions of the martyrs, saying that Jesus is the Messiah, were hardly an irrevocable stepping-out of faith. Agamben makes his point too strongly here; he barely lets faith become conscious of itself.

However, I do agree with what I take to be his main point: faith is never the profession itself. Faith is not assent to dogmatic statements. The profession, the dogma, instead safeguards the faith, by defining and defending it from opposition, and giving believers a moment to reflect on the parameters of their experience.

Thus, despite Agamben’s overstatement, I think he brings out Paul’s experience very well. Paul’s experience is an immediate, trustful grasping of Jesus Messiah, of Jesus Savior, of weak-human-powerful-divine-rescuer-Lord-Jesus. Jesus comes to him in a flash, in other words, in full Messianic glory, such that the weak-and-humble-power-of-God Jesus sweeps Paul up and toward Him in victory, rescuing him before he even knows it. Agamben describes this beautifully, in what might be the best description of faith ever written by a professed atheist:

But what then is the world of faith? Not a world of substance and qualities, not a world in which the grass is green, the sun is warm, and the snow is white. No, it is not a world of predicates, of existences and of essences, but a world of indivisible events, in which I do not judge, nor do I believe that the snow is white and the sun is warm, but I am transported and displaced in the snow’s-being-white and in the sun’s-being-warm. In the end, it is a world in which I do not believe that Jesus, such-and-such a man, is the Messiah, only-begotten son of God, begotten and not created, consubstantial in the Father. I only believe in Jesus Messiah; I am carried away and enraptured in him, in such a way that “I do not live, but the Messiah lives in me.” (Gal. 2:20).

For a brief (but more technical and difficult) critique of the remainder of Agamben’s analysis of Pauline faith, see the postscript at the end of this post.

THE NAME OF JESUS MESSIAH

What, then, really is faith for Paul? It is trust in the Word – the Name of Jesus of Nazareth – which I keep near to my heart and close to my lips. It is trust that in this Name, which I faithfully profess, there is power – the power of the weak-yet-mighty-divine-human-rescuer I encounter and grasp onto each and every moment of my existence. When this faith comes to words, Paul utters it as one in love, one utterly faithful: Jesus Messiah You are with us! Hallelujah!

Of course, it is a short bridge from this to the statement: Jesus is Messiah, and from there dogmatics comes to its proper work. This is good, regardless of Agamben’s claims to the contrary. But for Paul, any articulation of who Jesus is must come from this basic encounter. It must come from faithful experience, and from the testimonies of the apostles. Only with these resources in tow can we ask the faith-filled question: what does it mean that the risen Christ has come to us? Even today, when doing dogmatics, we rely on these fundamental resources.

Paul’s basic claim, the basic encounter he has experienced, is of Jesus the risen Messiah, come to him in full power, demanding faith and obedience, and giving grace and freedom. Yet what is the situation that Paul must be freed from? Why does he need grace?

I have not been able to fully describe how Jesus Messiah is experienced here. To do that, I’d have to say just what, exactly, this Messiah rescues us from – and how this is experienced in faith. But this would take us into questions about sin and the atonement, and therefore I cannot talk about it here. Those subjects are too vast. I will, however, discuss these topics in other posts down the line!

POSTSCRIPT:

Agamben’s analysis of faith in Paul goes on for several more pages before the chapter I discuss here concludes. I won’t go through all the details here, but I do think a broad critique of where Agamben goes is in order – lest this post be construed as an outright endorsement of his interpretation of Paul.

After his beautiful description of faith-life, which I quoted in full at the end of “The Experience of Faith,” Agamben goes on to talk about the word of faith. Here he talks about how the profession of this word (pisteuein eis Iesoun christen) is already a performative act, one that enacts faith and thereby realizes the very justification in which it believes.

J.L. Austin’s famous notion of the “performative utterance” is important here. Paul’s profession “I believe in Jesus Messiah” is something like the minister’s utterance of “I now pronounce you husband and wife” at a wedding – the word does what it says; at the very moment the phrase is said, and because it is said, everything changes. The declaration makes the marriage, just as the profession makes faith. No extra action is required: the minister has pronounced it, and so it now is; Paul has confessed it, and so it now is.

There is much to be said for this analysis, and I am influenced by it. But notice that Agamben is also avoiding the ontological reality behind this word, and the possibility of its performing anything definitive. He claims that “The word of faith manifests itself as the effective experience of a pure power [potenza] of saying that, as such, does not coincide with any denotative proposition, or with the performative value of a speech act. Rather it exists as the absolute nearness of the word. One therefore understands why, for Paul, messianic power finds its telos in weakness” (Agamben 136).

Here Agamben is noting the Greek meaning of the term power. I hope to go deeper into the meaning of this word in another post, but for now I will note that, in Greek thought, the term dunamis, which Paul uses, is also the word for potentiality. This is contrasted, most notably in Aristotle, with the term energeia, generally translated as actuality or work – and it is the very word that Paul uses when he talks about God “working in you.”

Energeia, then, is the coming-to-fruition, the standing-in-and-by-itself, the independent actualization, of dunamis. God’s power is His presence in its potentiality, in a state of possibility waiting for realization. God’s working in us is His coming to presence in and through us, the conforming of our wills to His so that He might become manifest in us. It is God’s becoming united to us, in what is traditionally called mystical union, union with Christ, or theosis.

When Paul says that Christ is the dunamis of God in us, he means that in Christ, and in His holy Name, God’s presence dwells within us, awaiting its fulfillment. Such presence only becomes fulfilled as we, by way of sanctification and deification, become ever more closely united with God.

Yet (note this!) God’s presence in this fulfillment does not replace me or my will, but rather perfects me: my humanity is actualized when God’s presence is actualized in me; my human nature and God’s divine nature stay distinct in their perfect communion. This is how God is made manifest – how His glory shines forth – in me. As St. Thomas Aquinas famously puts it: “Grace perfects nature.”

Incidentally – and I must add it as a side-critique – this is another problem with so-called “word of faith” theologies. They treat God’s power as though it were a strength available to us to use for our desires. But this is not Biblical. In fact, the power of God for Paul is the potential in the Christian for the conforming of our desires to His desires, so that He might make Himself present to the world in and through us!

We can see, then, the genuine theological inspiration at work in Agamben’s claim here – but I also think we can already see that the word of faith is being secularized. He is saying that the weakness of messianic power is in fact due to its potential character; for it is a word that is never actually said denotatively, never actually has a conceptual content, never actually designates anything really true, and never performs something definitive – but is rather spoken prior to any assertions about the world, or any defining utterances.

It is a pre-conceptual word that prevents any law, any moral system, any calcified claims about “the order of things” or “how things are,” from claiming us as its prisoner. It is a word of faith and love that refuses to be used by the law, but instead uses the law for itself. For “it acts in its own weakness, rendering the word of law inoperative, in de-creating and dismantling the states of fact or of law, making them freely available for use” (Agamben 137).

With this we have clearly stepped into postmodern territory, where faith becomes contentless and in some sense deconstructive – though the word of faith itself remains an undeconstructable guiding force (for faith neither needs nor desires concrete conceptual content). Agamben concludes by writing:

That this potentiality finds its telos in weakness means that it does not simply remain suspended in infinite deferral; rather, turning back towards itself, it fulfills and deactivates the very excess of signification over every signified, it extinguishes languages (1 Cor. 13:8). In this way, it bears witness to what, unexpressed and insignificant, remains in use forever near the word. (Agamben 137).

At this point, Christian faith has been abandoned. How has this happened? Is it because Agamben has totally rejected any and all content for faith? Yes, undoubtedly, and this is what I think most people would say. But I would argue that the most important reason is more subtle.

Agamben has relegated the power of the word of faith to my own speaking of the word; he has not allowed that power to flow in, to shine forth, from elsewhere – that is, from Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father.

“Power in weakness” has been reinterpreted by Agamben: it is no longer the potential for the presence of God in us made possible by Christ’s life of spiritual poverty and obedience to the Father unto the Cross, whose righteousness we may receive and then emulate; rather, this weakness is now the unassuming, ever-unactualized presence of the word, which refuses to be controlled by any law or any signifying denotation, but instead uses and discards such laws and signifiers, as is needed by the intimate and unexpressed requirements of faith, hope and love.

In thus changing the concept, Agamben has secularized Paul’s faith, which gains its life from the very one who is Life. Agamben is right to characterize faith as this intimate mode of trust, a trust in Jesus Messiah, which cannot ever be reduced to faith statements and morality. However, for Paul, it must be remembered that the power of the word of faith is the power of Christ, who Himself is “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24, NKJV).

The power of the word of faith, in other words, is the power of God, who is working in and through the believer. Agamben’s error, on a theological level (if not a philosophical level), is to attribute this power to the word of faith itself, and not its omnipotent source.

DAN TATE is a writer and blogger at Christ & Cosmos. A former atheist, he’s been surprised and amazed by the God of all things, and he’s passionate about sharing the gospel in ways that respond to contemporary concerns about theology, philosophy, spiritual practice, science, art, and more. A lifelong writer hailing from Upstate New York, he has a B.A. from Allegheny College, an M.A. from Syracuse University, and an M. Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary.