Faith was reckoned not just an alternative but a superior way of knowing what is true and what is false.

Jesus’s lordship is regarded as absolute and all-encompassing (1 Cor. 8:6; Phil. 2:9–11; Col. 1:18).

That is, the miraculous deeds that Jesus is described as performing (and other pieces of testimony) are signs; they are intended to point beyond themselves to a further reality.

Properly speaking, pistis is not part of the gospel but the fitting response to the gospel.

Although not everything that happens in life reflects God’s desired will (most obviously our own sin or the sin of others is not what God would wish to occur), all that happens is allowed within God’s permissive will.

The key point is that true pistis is not an irrational launching into the void but a reasonable, action-oriented response grounded in the conviction that God’s invisible underlying realities are more certain than any apparent realities.

By pointing to Jesus’s resurrection from the dead as what is necessary to hold mentally as real, Paul is merely condensing the gospel facts that he elsewhere expands, evoking the larger gospel narrative by association.

Abstracting this for-our-sins portion of the gospel from the full gospel and the larger narrative frameworks that control its meaning is risky, especially if over time this “Jesus died for our sins” portion is placed in a new, slightly different me-centered controlling narrative—as has happened in much of our contemporary Christian culture.

But “believe” meant mental acceptance and a single act of reception, and never meant what the term also means in the whole Bible: the kind of faith that is also faithfulness.