I have been editing the manuscript of my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor's Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, because a reissuing of that book is in the works to have it come out again at a lower price. I came across these lines in the stop at the Gospel of John. I find the thoughts I expressed here to be immensely important. They do nothing less than redefine what Christianity is, and they do that in a way that makes it so much more powerful, so much more life giving, for us today. So I'm posting them here. I hope you find them as meaningful as I do.
(c)Thomas C. Sorenson 2018. All rights reserved.
(c)Thomas C. Sorenson 2018. All rights reserved.
Believe
and Eternal Life: An Exercise in Biblical Language
Incarnation
is the major theme of John, but there are at least two other themes that we
must consider in order to understand just what the Gospel of John is all about.
The first is the concept “believe.” The second is the concept “eternal life.”
Both concepts are widely misunderstood. It turns out that they don’t mean what
we generally take them to mean. Both are good examples of the importance of
understanding the original Greek for understanding some of the central themes,
phrases, and concepts of the New Testament.
Believe
In the
Gospel of John, Jesus’ mission is to get people to believe in him. We see this
aspect of the Gospel of John in the most famous verse in the Bible, John 3:16
There Jesus says that God sent him to earth “so that everyone who believes in
him” might have eternal life. To understand what the fourth Gospel is all about
we have to understand what the Greek word or word root in words that get
translated as various forms of the noun belief or the verb to believe meant at
the end of the first century when the Gospel of John was written. It was of
course written in the common Greek of the time, so understanding the original Greek
is obviously rather important in our attempts to understand John. Believe
didn’t mean what people today usually take it to mean. That difference of
meaning has led to a wide-spread misunderstanding of what the Gospel of John is
all about, indeed what Christianity is all about.
What does
the word believe mean to you? In common parlance today to believe usually means
something like to accept the truth of some proposition without conclusive proof
that the proposition is true. We believe what we take to be true but cannot
firmly establish to be true. To believe means to hold the opinion that
something is true. Today to believe is mostly a mental, cognitive activity. It
is an action of the mind in accepting something as true.
It was
not always so. Theologians today have done much work to discover the origins of
today’s understanding of the concept “believe” and to compare that
understanding to older definitions of believe and to the original meaning in
Greek of the word that gets translated in the New Testament as believe. That
work has revealed that believe as it is used in the New Testament actually
meant something quite different from what it means today, quite different from
giving intellectual assent to the truth of some proposition.
All of
the nouns and verbs in John that are translated as some form of belief or
believe have as their root the Greek word “pistis.”
In New Testament Greek pistis doesn’t
mean give intellectual assent to or accept as true without conclusive proof or
hold the opinion that something is true as believe mostly does to us today. It
isn’t about cognitive activity at all, or at least it isn’t only or primarily
about cognitive activity. “Pistis”
doesn’t mean to accept as true. It means to trust, to be loyal to, to give
one’s heart to. It isn’t a matter of cognition. It is a matter of commitment.
It may be
helpful in understanding what pistis meant and what believe means in our
translations of John if we trace the translation history of pistis as it came into English as
believe. The first step was the translation of the Greek pistis into Latin. In the creeds it was translated as “credo.” You may be familiar with the
first line of the Nicene Creed in Latin (many of us are). It goes “ Credo in unum deum,” always rendered in
English are “I believe in one God.” The Latin word credo has as its root the
Latin word cor, which means heart. Credo, in its original meaning,
preserves the original meaning of pistis
as to give one’s heart to. It is a good translation of pistis into Latin.
Jump
ahead several centuries, and people began to translate the creeds and the Bible
into English. They translated them into English from the Latin, which was the
language of the western Church at the time. They translated the Latin credo into English as believe. That translation
from the Latin was preserved when people translated the Bible into English not
from the Latin but from the original Greek. The problem is that believe didn’t
mean then, in the 15th, 16th, and early 17th centuries,
what it means now. Theologians like Marcus Borg and Diana Butler Bass (who
isn’t actually a theologian but who sometimes talks like one) are fond of
saying that the original meaning of believe was the same as its linguistic
cousin “belieben” in German. Belieben means to love or, as Borg and
Bass say, “to belove.” We don’t use belove as a verb any more, but we see it in
our word beloved, as in “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…,” the
traditional opening of a wedding ceremony. Early on in the history of English
translations, believe was a good translation into English of pistis and credo.
As we
have seen, however, the meaning of believe has changed. That change came about
over several centuries, beginning with the rationalism of the European
Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries and the
scientific revolution that was a big part of it. In the Enlightenment and the
scientific revolution truth, which had been a much broader concept that
included mythic and symbolic truth as well as factual truth, was reduced to
fact. Science established facts, and religious people wanted their truth to be
the same order of truth as scientific truth. Never mind that religious truth is
unavoidably of a different order than scientific truth, that’s what they
wanted. They wanted their truth to be factual truth. Over time factual truth
came to be the only kind of truth people knew. For most Western people today it
still is.[1] If only fact is truth, then
the things we say we believe must be facts. Otherwise they are false. So
believe came to mean to take as fact. The mind displaced the heart as the seat
of belief. Intellectual assent to propositions about God as factually true
replaced the whole person trusting in God, giving one’s heart to God, which was
the original meaning of the word believe.
Consider
what a difference this understanding of belief as trust, as loyalty, as giving
one’s heart makes in how we understand the Gospel of John. Take our verse John
3:16 again. In the NRSV translation it reads: “For God so loved the world that
he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes
in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (Emphasis added) In the
modern understanding of believe this verse becomes an instruction to give
intellectual assent to the idea that Jesus is who in John he says he is, namely,
the Son of God Incarnate. The key to eternal life (see below for what that
means) is thinking that Jesus is God. The key to eternal life becomes holding
the opinion that Jesus is the Word (or the Son) of God become human.
Now
consider John 3:16 with the original meaning of the word believe rather than
the modern one. The verse then becomes a call to “belove” Jesus rather than to
give intellectual assent to propositions about him. The key to eternal life
(see below for what that means) becomes trusting in Jesus Christ, being loyal
to Jesus Christ, giving one’s heart to Jesus Christ and to the God we know in
and through him. Certainly the mind is involved in this believing, for the
heart cannot love what the mind cannot accept. Yet belief becomes so much more
than a mere action of the mind. It becomes commitment of the whole person—mind,
heart, body, and soul—to being a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. It becomes
a commitment to relate to him as beloved and knowing, not with the mind only
but with our whole being, that we are his beloved and God’s beloved.
In this
understanding of believe we show our belief in Jesus Christ not only or even
primarily by the words we say about him but by lives lived after his example,
lives of peace, justice, compassion, forgiveness, and love for God, neighbor,
and self. Returning to the original meaning of believe does nothing less than
change what it means to be a Christian. Our faith will be very different, and
very much more life giving, if we can just recapture the original meaning of
the word believe.
Eternal Life
Eternal
life is another key concept in the Gospel of John, and any adequate
understanding of the Gospel of John requires an adequate understanding of the
term eternal life.[2]
As with the word believe, it turns out that eternal life doesn’t mean what the
modern world generally takes it to mean. What do you think of when you hear the
phrase eternal life? If you are like most people today you probably hear “life
without end in heaven after we die.” There are indeed a couple of passages in
John that at least suggest that understanding of the afterlife (if not exactly
of eternal life). John’s Jesus does say “In my Father’s house there are many
dwelling places….I go to prepare a place for you.” John 14:2. Yet endless life
in heaven actually isn’t what the Gospel of John means by eternal life.
John’s
Jesus tells us at one point in the Gospel (and only at one point) what he means
by eternal life. At the beginning of his long prayer in chapter 17, known as
the Great Priestly Prayer, Jesus says: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your
Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over
all people to give eternal life to
all whom you gave him [i.e., all people]. And
this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus
Christ whom you have sent.” John 17:1-3 (emphasis added) Notice that John’s
Jesus doesn’t say “this is how you get eternal life.” I have often heard these
verses interpreted that way, but that simply isn’t what they say. They don’t
say this is the source of eternal life or the way to eternal life. They say
this is eternal life, to know God and
Jesus Christ.
Try
thinking of it this way.[3] The original Greek phrase
that is translated into English as “eternal life” is zoes aionis. Zoes (or
simply zoe) is the ordinary Greek
word for life. There are no issues there. The adjective aionis however is more problematic. Usually translated “eternal,”
its root is the word aion. Aion means “age.” In the New Testament
it is often used to refer to the world the way it is now when used with the
adjective “this.” When Paul says do not be conformed to this world he says in
the Greek do not be conformed to this aion.
The word can also refer to the promised age to come, the age of God, the
age of the Second Coming. In this meaning it refers to the world the way it
will be at the end of time. It is an eschatological term, one that refers to
God’s transformation of the world in the last days. In that age to come all
people will know God intimately because God will be present on earth in a new
way. The Book of Revelation, in one of its beautiful passages rather than one
of its brutally ugly ones, puts it this way: “See, the home of God is among
mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself
will be with them.” Revelation 21:3[4]
Now
please consider how John’s Jesus defines the term “eternal life,” zoes aionis, this way. “And this is life
of the age to come, that all may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ
whom you have sent.” Eternal life becomes not something that we get after we
die. It becomes a kind of life on earth, a life transformed by our knowledge of
God in and through Jesus Christ.
Now take
this understanding of eternal life and apply it and our revised understanding
of believe to John 3:16. That famous verse now reads: “For God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who gives their heart to him
may not perish but live the life of the age to come, which is life in the knowledge
of God through Jesus Christ.” Eternal life is life in the presence and
knowledge of God the way Revelation envisions it for the age to come, only that
life lived now, because giving our hearts to Jesus Christ gives us knowledge of
the only true God now, in this life.
Think for
a moment how different that way of understanding John 3:16 is from the
conventional understanding. That famous verse today is almost universally
understood to mean you have to take as true the proposition that Jesus is the
Christ, the Son of God, your Lord and Savior, so that your soul can go to
heaven when you die. That way of understanding the verse makes Christianity be
all about giving intellectual assent to some words in order to secure some
blessed thing after you die. As Marcus Borg says somewhere, it is strange to
think that God cares that much about what we think; but today’s common
understanding of John 3:16, and indeed of the whole Gospel of John and the
entire Christian faith, makes the faith be about what we think, and about some
longed-for future life after we die rather than this life. I think Jesus would
be appalled. Our re-visioned way of hearing John 3:16 makes it, and the entire
Christian faith, be about the whole orientation of our lives in this life, here
and now. It makes the faith be about the whole person, not only the mind. It
makes the faith be about how we live now, not only about how we may live
hereafter. Don’t you think that way of seeing the Christian faith is a lot
truer to what Jesus and God really want from us? I do.
[1] For a discussion of a much
broader meaning of truth see my Liberating
Christianity, chapter 4.
[2] Perhaps surprisingly, the
phrase appears mostly in the first half of the Gospel but only rarely in the
second half. That difference in the Evangelist’s usage of the term seems to be
related to a change in Jesus’ audience as the Gospel unfolds. In the first half
of the Gospel Jesus speaks mostly to the people generally and to his opponents.
In the second half of the Gospel he speaks mostly to his disciples, people who
already believe in him (see above for what that means). The disciples then
already have eternal life (whatever that means—stay tuned), so Jesus speaks to
them more about love. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one
another.” John 13:34
[3] I have never seen this
exegesis anywhere, and perhaps a real Greek scholar could show that there is
some flaw in it, but it makes sense to me. I offer it to you so see if it makes
sense to you too.
[4] I do not mean to suggest
by citing Revelation here that John of Patmos, the author of Revelation, is
also the author of the Gospel of John. He isn’t.
