Sunday Morning Greek Blog

Part 1 of the Romans podcast series may be found here.

Pip: Welcome to Sunday Morning Greek Blog, where the coffee is hot and the participles are passive — and sometimes that’s the whole point.

Mara: Scott Stocking is our guide this episode, working through Romans with a close eye on the Greek text — what words like pistis and dikaiosyne actually mean, and why the translation choices matter for how we understand salvation.

Pip: Let’s start with the Romans Road and what happens when you read it in the original language.

Romans 3:23–24 and the Faithfulness That Saves

Pip: The post on Romans 3:23–24 opens a question most readers skip right past: when Paul says we are justified by faith, whose faith is he actually talking about — ours, or Christ’s?

Mara: The post frames it this way: “For all who are being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came through Messiah Jesus sinned and are lacking the glory of God.” That rearrangement of word order is deliberate — the participle dikaioumenoi, meaning “who are being justified,” attaches directly to “all,” making justification an ongoing process, not a completed event.

Pip: So the grammar itself is doing theological work. Being justified is present tense, active right now, not a box you checked at conversion.

Mara: Exactly. And that present-tense framing connects to a comparison with Ephesians 2:8, where the parallel construction swaps “through the redemption in Christ Jesus” for “through faithfulness, and this not from yourselves.” The argument is that the faithfulness in view is Christ’s — his obedience to the cross — not a quantity of belief we have to produce on our own.

Pip: Which dissolves a question that has quietly tormented a lot of Christians: do I have enough faith to be saved? If the faithfulness is Christ’s, the answer is structurally irrelevant to us.

Mara: The post makes that point directly. If salvation rests on our faith, it becomes relative — how much is enough? But if it rests on Christ’s faithfulness, the statement becomes absolute. Our own trust in Jesus is, as the post puts it, “not so much for the purpose of being saved but the result of being saved.”

Pip: That’s a quiet but significant inversion of how the passage usually gets preached.

Mara: The companion piece on pistis across Romans 1–5 develops this at length. It argues that the phrase pisteos Iesou Christou — “the faithfulness of Jesus Christ” — in Romans 3:22 is a subjective genitive: Christ is the one being faithful, not merely the object of our faith. The post traces that reading through the whole arc of Romans 1–5, from God’s wrath under the Law in chapters 1 through 3, to Abraham’s faithfulness in chapter 4, to the application in chapter 5.

Mara: The inclusio that brackets the entire letter is telling: the phrase eis hypakoēn pisteōs — “into obedience of faithfulness” — appears in both 1:5 and 16:26, the first and last occurrences of pistis in Romans. That structural frame suggests Paul’s whole argument is about faithful obedience, not faith as a discrete interior event.

Pip: So Romans is less a manual for how to believe and more a demonstration that Christ already did the believing on our behalf — and we walk in the wake of that.

Mara: With the caveat that our own faithfulness still matters — the post is careful to say this doesn’t imply universalism or unconditional security, but rather a call to trust more deeply because God has already demonstrated his reliability. Works, confession, and obedience all follow from that trust.

Pip: From the mechanics of justification to the question of who the righteous one actually is — that thread runs all the way back to Romans 1:17, which is where the deeper argument begins.

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Mara: The thread connecting both posts is really one question: what kind of faithfulness is Romans built on, and does the Greek text change the answer?

Pip: Turns out the grammar has opinions. Next time, we’ll see where else those opinions show up.