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Faith According to Douglas Campbell

Soon you will have more posts from me on the Deliverance of God. I'm just about done reading the section on Romans and thus will soon be ready to work my way through it in detail. In the meantime, I thought I'd leave you with a key summary of Campbell's understanding of faith.

The notion of "faith" emerging from my reading of Romans 1-4 is essentially participatory. That is, "Christian faith"  which seems to embrace several related aspects from right beliefs about God, through trust, to steadfast fidelity over time, is isomorphic with Christ's own "faith." Moreover, Christ's "faith" is a metonymic motif that evokes the broader phenomenon of his passion, and in particular the downward trajectory of his martyrdom - that he was "obedient to the point of death - even death on a cross" (Phil. 2:8b). So the motif of faith is best located in a set of key narratives; Christian faith, like Christ's faith, functions within a story (a story, it should be recalled, attempting to narrate a reality that grips both Christ and the Christian)...a participatory relationship, the Christian being caught up into Christ's story in the deeper sense of being caught up into Christ himself, presumably by the work of the Spirit, thereby being drawn into the new creation and the age to come (Deliverance of God p. 756).

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