of believers since.
Only faith may affirm that God acted in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Only faith can affirm that Jesus died “for our sins,” as the earliest Christian confession declares (1 Cor. 15:3). For Paul, to have faith is to appropriate God’s action in the past and make it one’s own. Only then the purpose of Christ’s incarnation becomes a reality in a human being. On the basis of faith a Christian can hope. The future offers hope to those who have internalized the cross and the resurrection of Christ. For Paul, hope presupposes faith. Faith has its object in the past. Hope has its object in the future. What one says about the future, if it is not going to prove a chimera, can only be affirmed with certainty on the basis of what the past has demonstrated about the one who promised what is hoped for. The Christian hope for life in the Age to Come can only be based on God’s past action. Christians live on the basis of their faith in what God has done and their hope in what God promised to do. As far as Paul is concerned, what God did at the cross and the resurrection was the fulfillment of his promise to Abraham. A promise is always a past event. One may expect a promise, but one does not have a promise until one has faith in the one who promised. Faith sees the execution of Jesus and the encounters with the Risen Christ as the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham. That is the basis on which a Christian hopes for the fulfillment of the promise of the Day of Christ.
It is neither necessary nor healthy to live in the past or the future. Therefore, faith and hope by themselves are not enough. Life must be lived in the present. Faith, as said above, grasps God’s action in the crucifixion and the resurrection, things that happened in the past. Hope, anticipates the future triumph of God at the appearance of Christ in glory to be seen by all. Christians, however, must live in the present. Here is where love comes in.
The word “love” has become an abused concept. One hears of the love of wisdom, the love of sexual passion and the love of chocolate. Paul views love quite differently; for him, the love of God is the energy source for all divine action. Christian love is the power that transposes faith and hope into objective acts with consequences in the concreteness of the present. A melody that has been transposed to a different key remains the same but carries its message in a different mold. Christians must transpose their faith and hope from an intellectual key into a practical key. That is how faith and hope become Christian love. The Christian manner of being and living actualizes in the present what faith affirms about the past and hope envisions for the future. Normally, humans live in chronological time: from the past, through the present and into the future. Believers live their Christianity from the internalization of the past and the future of God’s actions into the present of their own activity. They live in the present manifesting God’s actions in human acts of love. Thus the past and the future of God become real in the present. In this way God’s love for the world is historically present.
The Christian life is not a way of escaping from the reality of life in the world, as some throughout history have presented it. Neither is it a way of following the ancient and presently-popular formula carpe diem, seize the day. This dictum advises to live the present as if there were no tomorrow: forget the past and its burdens and have no illusions about tomorrow and its accidents. That is, live today for what it may offer you in immediate satisfactions.
For Paul, life must be lived fully in the present, and the only way to do that is to be rooted in a solid past event and have a clear vision of what life is for. Only when the present is a living testimony of where life is rooted and what it is about does the present have any claim to transcendence. For Paul, Christians must testify to the love of God; but love is not an emotion, or a feeling, or a virtue. It is not something that exists as such and can be defined by itself. Love is the working out of faith and hope (Gal. 5:6). It is the Christian “manner of life” in the world (Phil. 1:27). Paul’s theology is the theology of living the full life, that is the theology of faith, hope and love, and his ethic is the ethic of the love that embraces the world.
Naming the fruit of the Spirit, Paul lists love first (Gal. 5:22). When he gives concrete ethical advice to the Romans, he begins by saying: “Let love be genuine” (Rom. 12:9). A more literal translation of the original Greek would be: “Our love [must] not [be] hypocritical.” The original assumes the verb “to be” and supplies the definite article to the noun. It is not just any kind of love that Paul has in mind. He is writing about “the love,” that is, Christian love. What would make Christian love hypocritical? A love that is not the manifestation of God’s activity in the world. What does Paul consider to be genuine Christian love? A love that expresses faith in Christ’s cross and hopes for full participation in Christ’s glorification by extending to others the benefits of being “beloved by God” (1 Th. 1:4).
The intellectualization of faith had overtaken some members of the Christian community in Corinth. They trusted in their knowledge of God in order to defend a particular way of life both in church and in society. They lived under the slogan “We have knowledge” (1 Cor. 8:1), and the corollary to that slogan was “all things are lawful” (1 Cor. 2:12; 10:23). Paul insists that faith is not a way of gaining access to esoteric knowledge. Those claiming to posses it may be “puffed up.” To such he says, “but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). With two conditional sentences he takes away all claims to perfect knowledge and affirms, instead, the efficacy of love. “If any one imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if one loves God, one is known by him” (1 Cor. 8:2 – 3). Christians do not trust what they know. They trust the God who knows them.
For Paul, faith and hope in God is not what ultimately count. A Christian’s participation in the life of the Spirit, which is life in God, is only made evident by the life of love that reveals God’s knowledge of that individual. The theological affirmations and the religious claims of Christians are not ultimately tested by their logic or by appeals to a biblical quotation. They are tested by the way in which the Christians who make them live out their faith and hope through acts of love, by whether their manner of life is worthy of the gospel. Even while Paul gives an important role to thinking and speaking he does not understands Christianity as a way of thinking, a way of knowing, or even a way of believing. He encouraged his readers to think critically and be fully persuaded intellectually as to what is God’s will (Rom. 14:5). But he does not think that Christianity is primarily a matter of knowledge. For Paul, Christianity is a way of being. That is why the famous Pauline poem to love ends with the admonition, “Pursue love” (1 Cor. 14:1). He further advises the Corinthians, “Let all that you do be done in love” (1 Cor. 16:14).
At the core of Paul’s exposition of the superiority of love are found the words “love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7). At first glance these phrases would seem to espouse passive submission to the vicissitudes of life. The phrases, however, form a classic chiasmic parallelism, well known to Hebrew poets. The first two terms deal with the present — love bears and believes. The second two look to the future — love hopes and endures. The first and the last — bears and endures — share content, and the second and third — believes and hopes — are love’s two companions. Together the four terms are interlocked to bring out the stability and purposefulness of love. Love is not shaky, love is not insecure, love is not passive, love does not settle down for the status quo., love is not a receptacle for things as they are. Paul cannot be charged with an ethic of passivity. His is not the Stoic ethic of emotional detachment. For him, love is positive, love is inventive, love is full of surprises, love is full of miracles. Love does not bear, believe, hope and endure because it is stupid, gullible, unrealistic or submissive to the point of irresponsibility. Love bears, believes, hopes and endures because it is powerfully grounded on God and embraces life.
In all its manifestations Christian love is one and the same because it is grounded on the unity of life in the Spirit that pours God’s love into human hearts (Rom. 5:6). The workings of love reveal that the vitality to live comes from a source which is not one’s own. Christian lovers are driven by the desire of creatures to be reunited with the source of life. For this reason love can only be the living expression of faith and hope.
Paul
