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All Christians know that faith is basic to their relationship with God through Christ. Believing in the Good News of Jesus, as Paul emphasizes repeatedly in this very letter of Romans, is the way we appropriate God’s grace in Christ. All Christians also know that they are supposed to obey God. But many Christians are puzzled about how faith and obedience relate. We know that even the most sincere and mature believer does not obey God perfectly. Is obedience then optional? Since we all “fall short,” does it really make any difference whether we obey God? Won’t He forgive us even if we fail?
Paul touches on this relationship in the opening verses of Romans. Many readers of this epistle skip over these verses, thinking they contain only boring introductory matters that prepare for the real beginning of the letter in verse 16. But ignoring verses 1–15 is a mistake. For, like the overture to an opera, these verses touch on some of the key themes that will reverberate throughout the letter. And one of those themes is the relationship between faith and obedience. To be sure, Paul only touches on this matter in a single phrase. But seen in the light of Romans and Paul’s teaching as a whole, the phrase has much to teach us about the integration of faith and obedience.
Having staked his claim to be an apostle, called by God to proclaim the good news about Jesus Christ (vv. 1–4), Paul in verse 5 elaborates: He says he has received “grace and apostleship for the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles” (my own literal translation). We easily overlook this little phrase “the obedience of faith” in the midst of everything else Paul is saying in these verses. Yet Paul signals the importance of the phrase by using it again at the very end of Romans (16:26). What is interesting in this statement of his own apostolic mission is the focus on obedience. We often think of Paul as a pioneering evangelist. And we would expect an evangelist to claim that his purpose is to bring people to faith. Yet Paul is not content to say simply “faith” here; he speaks of “the obedience of faith.” At the very beginning of Romans, Paul sends a clear signal that obeying God is a basic part of what Christianity is all about.
Translations and commentators try to clarify this phrase by being more specific. The New King James Version renders the phrase as “obedience to the faith.” By using the definite article before faith, this translation suggests that “faith” refers to the body of Christian teaching. Jude uses the word this way in the well-known phrase “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Paul, according to this rendering, wanted the Gentiles to adhere firmly to the basic teaching of Christianity. The New International Version puts a different spin on the phrase, translating it as “the obedience that comes from faith.” This translation takes “faith” in its normal Pauline sense, the act of believing, and suggests that obedience to God should follow from faith. And some commentators argue for yet a third option. They note that Paul uses “obey” in some places as if it were equivalent to “believe” (see, for instance, Rom. 10:16). So the phrase here might mean “the obedience that is faith.” In other words, Paul would just be saying in two different ways that his mission was to bring Gentiles to an initial faith response to the Gospel.
Paul does not elaborate on the phrase in this context, so we have no certain way of knowing just what he intended. But in light of his teaching elsewhere, I would like to suggest that he has deliberately coined a phrase that puts obedience and faith into a mutually supporting relationship. Paul wants to say that true Christian faith is always characterized by obedience and that no true obedience of God can be present without faith. Faith and obedience are two sides of the same coin. You cannot have the one without the other.
If my interpretation is on target, it helps to guard against two opposite errors. On the one hand are those who fall into a kind of “two-stage” idea of Christian experience: One first believes in Jesus Christ and then at some later point in time commits to Him as Lord of one’s life. To be sure, none of us can realize all the implications of the Lordship of Jesus when we first come to Him. Our lives in Christ are marked by experiences and even crises in which we are forced to come to grips in ever-new ways with just what it means in practice to follow Jesus as Lord. But a willingness to follow Jesus wherever He might lead must be part of our Christian commitment from the time of conversion. On the other hand are those professing Christians who take away from the decisive nature of faith for conversion by turning our “works” of obedience into a basis for salvation. But as Paul makes abundantly clear in Romans, it is faith, and “faith alone,” that puts us into relationship with God and saves us from the judgment to come. “Faith alone,” one of the great rallying cries of the Reformation, must not be watered down. But faith, a true commitment of the will to Christ, can never “be alone.”
Faith and obedience must not be mixed or they lose their essential character. But they must not be separated, either—for neither can exist without the other. Our obedience on earth will never be perfect. But obedience is not an option in the Christian life, for faith cannot exist without it.