Faith in Protestant theology is instrumental, the passive human means by which we appropriate the righteousness of Christ, by which we stand righteous before God.
In Galatians at least, Paul’s characteristic construction doesn’t use the usual prepositions of instrumentality – en and dia . Rather, he uses ek , which has the basic connotation of exit from, separation from, or source. ek can have an instrumental sense, and even seems to be used in place of en at times. So, “by faith” is not necessarily wrong.
But have we spend enough time considering the alternatives? Might ek pisteos mean source, origin, or cause in some contexts? And, might pistis here be shorthand for pistis Christou , perhaps understood in Hays’s sense of “the faith(fulness) of Christ?
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