The debate over which view is correct,
the objective genitive interpretation or the subjective genitive interpretation,
can get very technical and involved. Both views have been well argued by very competent
Pauline scholars. Nevertheless, there are multiple indications in Paul’s Pauline
scholars. Nevertheless, there are multiple indications in Paul’s letters, taken
as a whole, that incline me at least to believe that the subjective genitive interpretation
(“the faith of Christ” [Jesus’s own trust in God]) was indeed what Paul
intended, as that better corresponds to Paul’s Christology, especially
regarding his view of Jesus Christ as the second Adam.
In the first three centuries a
subjective genitive interpretation was commonplace among Christians, but in the
fourth century it was abandoned by orthodox Christians—a casualty of the ongoing
christological debates, particularly in the struggle against Arianism.
Thereafter, an objective genitive interpretation became standard, to the extent
that since the Protestant Reformation it has become almost exclusively the sole
interpretation that Christians learned. Only with the advent of modern critical
Pauline scholarship, with its goal to recover the “authentic Paul,” has the
subjective genitive interpretation reemerged—and is steadily gaining adherents.
An important recent study of the subjective genitive interpretation in Pauline
literature is that of Richard B. Hays, who steadfastly maintains that “the faith
of (Jesus) Christ” is the correct rendering of Paul’s meaning. (Hays, Faith
of Jesus Christ, 115-62). The fact that the earliest Christians mostly
understood a subjective genitive construction here is in and of itself a powerful
argument for thinking that such was indeed Paul’s meaning, since those ancient readers,
being closer in time and cultural context to the author, are more likely than
later Christians to have understood correctly the mind of Paul.
Furthermore, if one leaves aside those
passages containing the controverted phrase pistis Christou (or the
equivalent, there are no examples of Paul using pistis (“faith”) with an
objective genitive. By contrast, Paul used pistis with a subjective
genitive some twenty-four times.
The most convincing example is Romans
4:16, where Paul employs a subjective genitive construction to highlight “the
faith of Abraham.” (The phrase “from the faith of Abraham” [ek pisteōs Abraam]
in Rom 4:16 is an exact grammatical parallel to the phrase “from the faith of
Jesus” [ek pisteōs Iēsou (Christou)] in Rom 3:26 and Gal 3:22) In
Paul’s view, there is a kind of symmetry between ”the faith of Abraham” and “the
faith of Christ.” God declared Abraham righteous—right (with God)—because Abraham
trusted God. At the same time, God’s “righting” of Abraham served a larger
purpose in God’s salvific plan to save all people. “Now the words, ‘it was
reckoned to him,’ were written not just for his sake alone, but for ours also”
(4:23-24). Like Abraham, Paul argues, we also will be declared “right” before God
if we trust the God who raised Jesus from death. Abraham is thus a prototype of
Jesus.
Jesus is greater than Abraham, of
course, not just because Jesus’s trust in God was absolute while Abraham had to
be further tested (Gen 22:1), but also because through Jesus’s fidelity God
accomplished the salvation of all humankind, Jesus’s place in the divine plan
is therefore much more radical than that of Abraham. The effects of Jesus’
absolute trusting of God reach both forward and backward. Forward, to all who
follow Jesus; and backward, all the way to Adam himself. No one is excluded
from God’s saving grace effected through the second Adam. Everyone is saved
through “the faith of Christ” so long as one is “in Christ.” (Bernard F. Batto,
The Many Faces of Adam and Eve [Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022], 144-46)
