THIS is a very powerful and demanding book that is likely to change your thinking profoundly. Teresa Morgan is an Anglican priest, Professor of Graeco-Roman history at Oxford, and shortly to become Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Yale Divinity School.

Her new book is a follow-up to her widely acclaimed Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and fides in the early Roman Empire (OUP, 2015). In the latter, she argued that pistis (in Greek) and fides (in Latin), often translated as “faith” or “belief” in the New Testament, in reality usually signified “trust” across Classical, Jewish, and Christian first-century literature. She argued this at length (625 pages), and with impressive scholarship.

The new book repeats and occasionally corrects her earlier claims, and adds an extended theological discussion of them, together with insights about “trust” from recent philosophy and social science. As she has devoted far more than 1000 densely argued pages across the two books to a single issue, it is going to take a formidable (and highly assiduous) scholar to rebut her central thesis successfully.

Has this mammoth task been worth while? My verdict is a very emphatic “Yes”. Once theologians and Christian ethicists have absorbed her central thesis, they should see that it is as transforming as the New Testament studies on the concept of “the Kingdom of God” in the Synoptic Gospels were five decades ago. Our theology and preaching then needed to change, with less emphasis on the Church and more on the Kingdom of God. Now, we need to change again, with less emphasis on “belief” and more on “trust”.

She points out repeatedly just how central pistis and the verb pisteuein are in the New Testament. They are favourite Pauline terms, but they also occur in every Gospel and epistle in the New Testament, except 2 John. In my Greek lexicon, they occupy 11 columns. She states at the outset that she is not attempting to write a systematic theology of trust, and that the various New Testament writers have different ideas about the part played by pistis (most obviously with sharp differences between Paul and James). Inevitably, this makes her narrative winding and complex.

Nevertheless, she offers many illuminating theological points about “trust”, sometimes just in a passing footnote. I love this one:
 

Psychological models assume that children are born with the capacity and impulse to trust, which, for instance, a theory of original sin would not, but this chapter follows most New Testament writings in assuming that everyone has the capacity to trust, though people sometimes trust mistakenly.
 

Professor Morgan also writes movingly about damaged children who have never felt trusted by their parents, and, in contrast, about prisoner-rehabilitation schemes that show genuine trust to damaged adult ex-offenders. Trust, she argues very properly, is an essential component of worthwhile living. I have long argued that pistis, understood as trust, is a key feature of the Synoptic healing stories that is still crucial to doctor-patient relations. Things go badly wrong when patients do not trust their doctors, and when their doctors do not trust them. She occasionally uses examples from modern medicine, too, but might have explored them further with benefit.

Her discussion of atonement (thankfully) is more extended, and, for me, just as attractive. Unlike sacrificial and penal-substitutionary models of atonement, it focuses less on the cross and more on resurrection experiences, arguing that “nothing changes until human beings respond” to Christ’s trust in God on the cross with our trust. And, inevitably, she has much to say about accounts of “justification by faith” which emphasise belief rather than trust.

She does, though, have little to say about ongoing liturgical credal and baptismal statements, although it is not too difficult to guess what she might think about some of them. As a bonus, being a skilled violinist, she also has a wonderfully nuanced few paragraphs on theology and music. She is nothing but erudite.

One final point that she alludes to: in the first century, almost everyone believed in the existence of God, or gods, but was not sure (with good reason) that the gods could be trusted. Today, a growing proportion of Western societies no longer believe in any deity. Perhaps it is time to take the heat off religious belief and to debate, instead, what or whom we can ultimately trust.

Do borrow this book from a library, or hope that it will soon be an affordable paperback. But be warned — it is a tough and demanding, but essential, read.

Canon Robin Gill is Emeritus Professor of Applied Theology at the University of Kent, and Editor of Theology.

The New Testament and the Theology of Trust: “This rich trust”
Teresa Morgan
OUP £90
9780192859587
Church Times Bookshop £81