I’ve been reading N.T. Wright’s, Jesus and the Victory of God. This morning I came across some great comments on “faith” regarding Jesus’ summons to “Repent and believe the good news”:

“[Faith or trust] can, in the biblical languages, be subdivided into ‘faith’ and ‘faithfulness.'”

“Faith… is not simply to be understood as a single, miscellaneous religious quality, ‘virtue’, or attribute. It is the distinguishing mark of the true people of YHWH at the time of crisis. It is one of the things, predictably, that will characterize the return from exile.”

“Faith is a crucial part of the definition of Israel at her time of great crisis. Jesus’ call for ‘faith’ was not merely the offering of a new religious option or dimension. It was a crucial element in the eschatological reconstitution of Israel around himself.”

“The ‘faith’ which is the concomitant of so many acts of healing is not simply ‘believing that Israel’s god can do this.’ It is believing that Israel’s god is acting climactically in the career of Jesus himself.”

“‘Faith’, as Jesus invited people to it, carried two particular overtones, one more obviously ‘religious’ and the other more apparently ‘secular.’ The ‘religious’ meaning, stressed at various points in the gospels, focused on the insistence that Israel’s god was to be seen as the ‘father’ of his people. This, it must be emphasized, was not a new thought; it is found in the Old Testament and in a fair amount of subsequent Jewish writings. Nor is it simply a matter of ‘father’ being one miscellaneous appellation among many for YHWH. Nor, yet, is it to be explained solely in terms of Jesus’ ‘religious experience.’ It is particularly associated with his great acts of deliverance, namely the exodus and the return from exile. To invoke this god as ‘father’ is to stir up associations of the great coming deliverance. Jesus, in inviting his hearers to think of their god explicitly in this way, was emphasizing a strand in Jewish tradition which implicitly carried forward his claim: those who possessed this ‘faith’ in YHWH as ‘father’ were defining themselves as the eschatological Israel.”

“‘Faith can also carry the more ‘secular’ meaning… Josephus asked Jesus the Galilean brigand leader [a different Jesus than in the New Testament] ‘to repent and believe in me,’ in other words, to give up his agenda and follow Josephus’ instead. Jesus of Nazareth, I suggest, issued more or less exactly the same summons to his contemporaries. They should give up their way of being the people of god and trust him for his. As with repentance, so with faith: Jesus’ call carried the implication that those who followed him, followed his way of being Israel, were the true Israel whom YHWH was calling into being as the real returned-from-exile ones. The call to ‘believe in the gospel,’ or to ‘believe in me,’ does not suggest the Jesus was inviting Galilean villagers to embrace a body of doctrine — not even a basic ‘theory’ about ‘salvation’ and how they might attain it, nor, again, very much of a christology (though presumably it involved recognizing Jesus as a god-sent prophet like John). Nor does it suggest that Jesus was offering them what we would today call a new ‘religious experience.’ It evokes the historical picture of one who believed that, with his work, Israel’s god was inaugurating his long-awaited kingdom.”