Was Paul of Tarsus the real founder of Christianity

N.T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said,: Was Paul of Tarsus the real founder of Christianity, Michigan, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997

Chapter 1

Puzzling Over Paul

…And when people proclaim most loudly that they are being Pauline, that the great apostle is their real guiding star, then we find often enough that they are elevating one aspect of his thinking above all the others, so much so that other aspects, for which he was equally concerned, are left to one side or even outrageously denied.—p.11

Albert Schweitzer [The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, 1968 (1930)]

…Paul is Jewish through and through, he [Schweitzer] said, even though, precisely through his work as the Jewish apostle to the Gentiles, he prepared the way for the subsequent Hellenization of Christianity.  Equally, Schweitzer argued that justification by faith, and the complex of issues that clusters around it, was not the heart and centre of Paul, but was rather a polemical thrust (emerging, after all, in only two letters and in a single passage in a third) relating to the very specific issue of the admission of uncircumcised Gentiles into the church.  Rather, the centre of Paul was what Schweitzer called ‘Christ-mysticism’.  By this he referred to the famous Pauline doctrine of ‘being in Christ’, and understood that doctrine against the background of apocalyptic Judaism.  The God of Israel had acted in the world dramatically, apocalyptically, through Jesus the Messiah.  The true people of God were now somehow bound up with this Messiah, this Christ.  They were incorporated ‘into’ him.—p.13

            …If you think that ‘justification by faith’ is the heart of Paul’s theology, you may wish to stress Romans 1-4 as the real centre of the letter.  If, with Schweitzer, you think that ‘being in Christ’ is the heart of Paul, you may wish to stress Romans 5-8 instead….—p.13

            A third question that accompanied Schweitzer’s analysis of Paul was that of its practical consequence.  What does Paul mean for today? For Schweitzer, I think, there were two meanings, positive and negative.  First, if (p.13)what mattered was ‘being in Christ’, rather than the logic-chopping debates about justification, then one was free to live out the life of Christ in new and different ways.  This, I think, was part of what sustained Schweitzer himself in his unique and extraordinary life and work.  Second, by the same token, one did not have to pay too much heed to what the official church was doing, since it was still stuck with Paul the dogmatic theologian….—pp.13-14

            Schweitzer bequeathed to us, in a nutshell, the four questions that are always asked about Paul.

1. Where do we put Paul in the history of first-century religion?
2. How do we understand his theology, its starting point and centre?
3. How do we read the individual letters, getting out of them what Paul himself put into them (the scholars’ word for this task is ‘exegesis’, as opposed to ‘eisegesis’, which means putting in a fresh meaning that Paul did not intend)?
4. And, what is the pay-off, the result, in terms of our own life and work today?—p.14

Rudolf Bultmann (in his New Testament Theology1951-55)

            Bultmann’s answers to the four questions run more or less as follows.  Paul belongs in his Hellenistic context; he was, after all, the apostle to the Gentiles, and he quickly abandoned the Jewish categories of his early thought and expressed his message in the categories, as well as the language, of the wider Greek world.  He thus stood over against the Jewish world in which his fellow-countrymen, by embracing the law, were refusing the possibility of authentic existence offered in Christ, the end of the law.  The heart and centre of Paul’s theology, for Bultmann, was therefore his analysis of the human plight and of the decision (‘faith’) by which one might escape it.  Paul, for Bultmann, retained the Jewish belief that the world was about to come to an end, but he made this a reason for abandoning the Jewish historical hopes and translating his message into the timeless categories of Greek thought. […]

            The price of Bultmann’s brilliant synthesis is very high.  Some parts of Paul just refused to fit into the scheme.  These he therefore cheerfully demoted: he claimed that they were either ‘glosses’ (words or phrases added to Paul’s text by later writers), or bits and pieces of Paul’s Jewish background which Paul himself had not really thought through in the light of his mature theology.  (I regard the claim to be able to think Paul’s thoughts better than Paul could himself to be extremely dubious….)–.15

W.D. Davies,

…Davies argued in his major work Paul and Rabbinic Judaism that Paul was, at bottom, a Jewish rabbi who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the Jewish Messiah. [1980 (3^rd edition; 1^st edition 1948]—p.16

            Davies’ work signals a new attitude to Judaism on the part of post-war scholarship.  Until then, Judaism had been regarded by most Pauline expositors as the great exemplar of the wrong sort of religion.  It represented human self-effort, legalism,. Prejudice and pride.  The reason Paul must have got his ideas from Hellenism, so it was thought, is that Jewish ones were irrevocably tainted.  Even to use them was to compromise the faith.  But with Davies the whole scene has changed, in line with the work of Karl Barth, with the so-called ‘biblical theology’ movement, and of course with the post-war reaction against the vile anti-Semitism which caused the Holocaust.  Judaism was suddenly in vogue; Jewish ideas were regarded as good, and Hellenisitc ones were labeled ‘pagan’ and therefore (implicitly) bad.  The questions of history, theology, exegesis and application all therefore received a quite new emphasis as a result of Davies’ work.  Most scholars have not followed him all the way in his derivation of one Pauline point after another from rabbinic sources (many of them, as he knew , are after all to be dated some centuries (p.16) later than Paul).  But he at least demonstrated that one could not dislocate Paul from his Jewish setting without doing his great violence.—pp.16-17

Ernst Kasemann, Perspectives on Paul, 1969, New Testament Questions of Today, 1971, Commentary on Romans, 1980.

….Kasemann attempted to retain the strong points of both Schweitzer and Bultmann.  On the one hand, he agreed with Schweitzer that Paul’s true background was to be found in apocalyptic Judaism.  On the other hand, he agreed with Bultmann and other Lutherans that the centre of Paul was to be found in his theology of justification, which struck at the heart of all human legalism and religious pride.  This was of cutting the cake enabled Kasemann to do far more justice to the detail of Paul’s writings than Bultmann….—p.17

            In Kasemann we get the first hint of a theme which, I shall suggest, is enormously important in our understanding of Paul: that, from within his Jewish context, Paul produced a critique of  Judaism—and that, conversely, if you clearly had a critique of Judaism you must have got it from somewhere else, from out Judaism.  Kasemann seems to recognize the point—which one might have thought would haven been obvious from the Old Testament prophets, not to mention John the Baptist and Jesus—that critique from within was in fact a central feature of Judaism all along….—p.17

E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion, 1977; Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People, 1983; Paul, 1991.q

…Judaism in Paul’s day was not, as has regularly been supposed, a (p.18) religion of legalistic works-righteousness.  If we imagine that it was, and that Paul was attacking it as if it was, we will do great violence to it and to him.  Most Protestant exegetes had read Paul and Judaism as if Judaism was a form of the old heresy Pelagianism, according to which humans must pull themselves up by their moral bootstraps and thereby earn justification, righteousness, and salvation.  No, said Sanders.  Keeping the law within Judaism always functioned within a covenantal scheme.  God took the initiative, when he made a covenant with Judaism; God’s grace thus precedes everything that people (specifically, Jews) do in response.  The Jew keeps the law out of gratitude, as the proper response to grace—not, in others words, in order to get into the covenant people, but to stay in.  Being ‘in’ in the first place was God’s gift.  This scheme Sanders famously labeled as ‘covenantal nomism’ (from the Greek nomos, law).  Keeping the Jewish law was the human response to God’s covenantal initiative.

            Sanders thus, at a stroke, cut the ground from under the majority reading of Paul, especially in mainline Protestantism.  Judaism, he insisted, was and is a perfectly valid and proper form of religion.  Paul’s only real critique of Judaism, according to Sanders, was that it was ‘not Christianity’.  Paul, having found salvation in Christianity, was forced to conclude that Judaism was not enough….—pp.18-19

Today’s Questions:

…Some still use him to legitimate an old-style ‘preaching of the gospel’, in which the basic problem is human sin and pride and the basic answer is the cross of Christ.  Others, without wishing to deny this as part of the Pauline message, are struggling to do justice to the wider categories and the larger questions that seem to be a non-negotiable part of Paul’s whole teaching.  This, indeed, is the category into which I would put myself, as the present work will make clear…. When, for instance, we confront the serious neo-paganism of the Western world, with its rampant materialism on the one hand and its ‘new age’ philosophies on the other, it is no bad time to remind ourselves (as we shall in a subsequent chapter) that Paul’s basic mission was to the pagans of his world, not to the Jews, and that he might just have something to say to contemporary paganism as well….—p.22

…What was the role of Paul in the foundation of Christianity?  Was Paul the true interpreter of Jesus?  Or was he a maverick innovator who invented a new religion, nothing to do with what Jesus had intended, in which the figure of ‘Jesus’ happened to play a central role?—p.22

…Hyam Maccoby, a well-known Jewish scholar and apologist, has argued in a number of books that Jesus, who (he says) has been well and truly obscured by the Christian ‘gospels’, was in fact a Pharisee, a good and loyal Jew who would not have dreamed of breaking with Judaism on any central point, let alone inventing a new religion.  Paul, however, says Maccoby, was never a Pharisee (despite Paul’s own explicitly claim); he was always on the margins of Judaism, a thoroughly Hellenized thinker who then reinterpreted Jesus within a Greek, perhaps even a Gnostic, frame of thought.  He succeeded only in producing a ‘Jesus’ who was the product of his own peculiar religio/philosophical imagination, a figure who bore no relation to Jesus himself and who belonged in the world of Greek religion, a cult-god.  Paul, according to Maccoby, thus paved the way for subsequent Western anti-Semitism.—p.22

….This book is an attempt to do just that: to stand back from the ways we have read Paul and to explore a bit more how Paul himself suggests we read him.  It is an attempt to study Paul in his own terms.  It is trying to come to grips with what he really said.—p.23

Chapter 2: Saul the Persecutor, Paul the Convert

Which type of Pharisee?

Saul’s persecution of the church, and the word ‘zeal’ with which he describes it, puts him firmly on the map of a certain type of first-century Judaism…. He must been following, agendas which make sense of his activity in persecuting the church even beyond the borders of the Holy Land itself.  It reveals Saul of Tarsus not just as a Jew, but as a Pharisee; not just as a Pharisee, but as a Shammaite Pharisee; not just, perhaps, as a Shammaite Pharisee, but as one of the strictest of the strict.

            Who were the Shammaites?  A division had taken place within Pharisaism in the generation before Saul of Tarsus.  During the reign of Herod the Great (36-4BC) there arose two schools of thought within the already powerful movement, following the two great teachers of the Herodian period, Hillel and Shammai…. Hillel is the ‘lenient’ one, and Shammai is the ‘strict’ one.  Their followers, likewise, argue issue after issue in terms of lenient and strict practices.—p.26

…he [Paul] was a Shammaite, a hard-line Pharisee-what we today would call a militant right-winger.—p.26

…they [Hillel and Shammai] are lenient or strict about the personal observance of the commands of Torah…. The key (p.26) issue at stake between ‘lenient’ and ‘strict’ interpretations of the law was not just a matter f religion.  Nor was it just about private or personal piety.  The key issue was as much ‘political’ as it was ‘theological’.  It was about aims and agendas for Israel: for the people, the land, and the Temple.

            The question, as for many Jews in most of Jewish history, was: what line do we adopt vis-à-vis the present political situation?  The Hillelites, broadly speaking, pursued a policy of ‘live and let live’.  Let the Herods and the Pilates, and indeed the Caiaphases, rule the world—let them even rule Israel, politically—just as long as we Jews are allowed to study and practice Torah (the Jewish law) in peace.  The Shammaites believed that this wasn’t good enough.  Torah itself, they thought, demanded that Israel be free from the Gentile yoke, free to serve God in peace, calling no-one master except YHWH, the one true God, himself.

            This is what it means to be ‘zealous for God’ or ‘zealous for the traditions of the fathers’ in first-century Judaism…. But whereas for the modern Christian ‘zeal’ is something you do on your knees, or in evangelism, or in works of charity, for the first-century Jew ‘zeal’ was something you did with a knife…. They saw themselves as being ‘zealous for YHWH’, ‘zealous for Torah’. And as having the right, and the duty, to put that zeal into operation with the use of violence.  ‘Zeal’ thus comes close to holy war: a war to be fought (initially, at any rate) guerrilla-style, by individuals committed to the cause.—pp.27

            After the destruction of the Temple in AD70, the Hillelites and Shammaites seem to have been more evenly matched, with Johanan ben Zakkai leading the Hillelites and Eleazar ben Hyrcanus a strong voice within the Shammaites.  The key issue then became: do we or don’t seek to recapture Jerusalem, to rebuild the Temple, to throw off the Roman yoke?  The Hillelites, seen in our evidence only through a haze of later Hillelite (and non-or anti-revolutionary) hagiography, urged that only Torah mattered.  The loss of the Temple was not after all so tragic, since one could still study and practice Torah and thereby enjoy the presence of God just as though one were in the Temple.  The Shammaites insisted that further violent revolution was still necessary: only the full liberation of Israel, and the rebuilding of the Temple, would do.  At the end of this period, Akiba, hailed subsequently even by the Hillelites as one of the greatest rabbis of all time, threw in his lot with the revolution of Simeon ben Kosiba, declaring that he was the Messiah, ‘the son of the star’, come to fight the holy war against the pagans.—p.29

The beliefs and hopes of Saul:

            We may, then, sketch picture of the agendas of a Shammaite Pharisee in the days of Saul of Tarsus, with some confidence that we are describing Saul himself…The Pharisees, and a good many Jews not aligned with any particular party, were still waiting for the great events to happen ‘according to the scriptures’ [Zechariah 8:23, 14:1-5, Ezekiel 47; Isaiah 40-55].  They were still in exile.  As the Qumran texts witness so poignantly, people were on tiptoe to believe that the real return from exile was about to happen—was, maybe, already beginning to happen, perhaps in secret.—p.30

…Saul, like a great many Jews of his day, read the Jewish Bible not least as a story in search of an ending; and he conceived of his own task as being to bring that ending about.  The story ran like this.  Israel had been called to be the covenant people of the creator God, to be the light that would lighten the dark world, the people through whom God would undo the sin of Adam and its effects.  But Israel had become sinful, and as a result had gone into exile, away from (p.30) her own land.  Although she had returned geographically from her exile, the real exilic condition was not yet finished.  The promises had not yet been fulfilled.  The Temple had not yet been rebuilt.  The Messiah had not yet come. The pagans had not yet been reduced to submission, nor had they begun to make pilgrimages to Zion to learn Torah.  Israel was still deeply compromised and sinful.

            Into this situation, the scriptures spoke clearly and powerfully of the time that would surely come when all these things would be put right.  This was not simply a matter of a few scattered prophecies, taken at random, predicting from a great distance odd bits and pieces of things that would come to pass one day.  Scripture told the story; Israel lived in the story; the story was moving towards its appointed conclusion.  One day soon YHWH would be king of all the earth; evil would be decisively defeated; Israel, or at least the true Jews within Israel, would be vindicated as the true people of the one true God.  This reading of scripture, which fuelled the zeal of the Shammaite, could be summarized theologically in the following way.  There are three cardinal points of Jewish theology in this period: monotheism, election and eschatology…. Believing all this, Saul of Tarsus was acting as best he knew ‘according to the scriptures’, understanding them not as a collection of proof-texts but as a story in search of an ending, an ending that he would himself help to bring about.

            The Shammaites, and the revolutionaries in general, were eager to bring these prophecies to fulfillment by their zeal for Torah.  They would not sit around and wait; they would take maters into their own hands.  This was also, explicitly, a zeal for God, as Paul refers to it in Romans 10:2…. Observing Torah would hasten the time of fulfillment.  If God were to act climatically now, within history, while Israel was still not keeping Torah properly, she would be condemned along with the Gentiles.  But for Israel to keep Torah she would need to be reminded, indeed urged, to this task; again, with due awareness of the problem of anachronism, we may compare the way in which today’s ultra-orthodox Jews insist upon the keeping of the Sabbath….—pp.30-31

            We must emphasize one thing at this point.  The picture I have drawn is very different from the picture of the pre-Christian Saul that I grew up with…. Saul, I used to believe, was a proto-Pelagian, who thought he could pull himself up by his moral bootstraps….—p.32

            But Saul of Tarsus was not interested in a timeless system of salvation, whether of works-righteousness or anything else…. He wanted God to ‘getting in’ and/or ‘staying I’ (Sanders’ categories).  He wanted God to redeem Israel…. Jews like Saul of Tarsus were not interested in an abstract, timeless, ahistorical system of salvation.  They were not even primarily interested in, as we say today, ‘going to heaven when they died’. (p.32)…. They were interested in the salvation which, they believed, the one true God had promised to his people Israel.

            One feature of this hope needs special attention at this point.  The purpose of the covenant, in the Hebrew Bible and in some subsequent writings, was never simply that the creator wanted to have Israel as a special people, irrespective of the fate of the rest of the world.  The purpose of the covenant was that, through this means, the creator would address and save his entire world.  The call of Abraham was designed to undo the sin of Adam.  But, as the exile made clear, Israel needed redeeming; the messenger needed a message of salvation.  The people with the solution had become part of the problem.  And, as I said before, most first-century Jews did not believe the exile had ended.  The Temple had not been rebuilt properly; the Messiah had not yet arrived; the general resurrection had not occurred; the Torah was not being observed perfectly; the Gentiles were not flocking in to hear the word of the Lord on Mount Zion.  Until these things had happened, God’s purpose and promises had not come to pass.

            This sets us up to understand two technical terms which we shall find it hard to do without.  First, what would ‘justification’ mean in this context?  ‘Justification’ is a law-court term, and in its Jewish context it refers to the greatest lawsuit of all: that which will take place on the great day when the true God judges all the nations, more particularly the nations that have been oppressing Israel.  God will, at last, find in favour of his people: he will judge the pagan nations and rescue his true people.    ‘Justification’ thus describes the coming great act of redemption and salvation, seen from the point of view of the covenant (Israel is God’s people) on the one hand and the law court on the other (God’s final judgment will be like a great law-court scene, with Israel winning the case).  Learning to ‘see’ an event in terms of two great themes like these is part of learning how first-century Jews understood the world.—pp.32-33

            The second major technical term that we cannot easily escape is ‘eschatology’.  Look this word up in the dictionary, and you will probably find something like ‘the doctrine of death, judgment, heaven and hell’….. when Jews and early Christians used ‘end-of-the-world’ language to describe this phenomenon they didn’t mean it literally.  They did not suppose that the world and history were actually going to come to an end.  They used ‘end-of-the-world’ language to invest major and cataclysmic events within history with their (as we might say) ‘earth-shattering’ significance.)  ‘Eschatology’ thus refers to the belief that history was going to reach, or perhaps that it had just reached, its great climax, its great turning-point.  Both the language they used to say this, and the belief itself, are also sometimes referred to as ‘apocalyptic’, though this has become so slippery a technical term that some scholars have given up using it altogether.

            Put these two (justification and eschatology) together, and what happens?  ‘Justification, the great moment of salvation seen in terms of the fulfillment of the covenant and in terms of the last great  law-court scene, would thus also be eschatological: it would be the final fulfillment of Israel’s long cherished hope.  Putting it another way, the Jewish eschatological hope was hope for justification, for God to vindicate his people at last.—p.34

            What, then, was the agenda of Saul of Tarsus?  We may draw it together in three points.  First, he was zealous for Israel’s God and for the Torah.  This (p.34) was a matter of personal piety, no doubt, and of fervent prayer and study.  His zeal for Torah was not, however, a Pelagian religion of self-help moralism.  It was zeal to see God honoured which necessitated stamping out, by whatever means were necessary, all forms of disloyalty to the Torah among Jews, and throwing off, again by whatever means might be necessary, the pagan yoke which polluted Israel’s land and prevented her from attaining the freedom that was her covenantal birthright.  Second, Saul intended that he and others should keep Torah so wholeheartedly in the present that they would be marked out already as those who would be vindicated on the great coming day when YHWH finally acted to save and redeem his people.  Third, he intended to hasten this day by forcing other Jews to keep the Torah in his way, using violence as and when necessary.  For him, these three things went closely together.  They provided a private and personal, as well as political and public, set of aims and goals.  It was in pursuit of these goals that he obtained authority from the chief priests—we may note that, as a Pharisee, he didn’t have any such right himself—to go off to Damascus to seize Christians, men and women alike, and to drag them off to prison.  They were renegade Jews, leading Israel astray from true loyalty to the one true God.  That is how he came to be traveling, on a day that any historian would regard as of major significance for subsequent world history, on the road to Damascus.—p.34-35

Saul’s Conversion and its Immediate Significance

Damascus road: the event and its significance

…Borrowing Juke’s language, Paul saw the risen Jesus even after the ascension.  The language he uses is not the language of mystical vision, of spiritual or religious experiences without any definite objective referent (p.35)…. It will not do, historically speaking, to spiritualize or psychologize the events, as though (for instance) Saul had been labouring with a troubled conscience for years and suddenly had a great religious experience which enabled him to throw off the burden and enjoy a new level or dimension of spiritual existence…–p.36

The significance of Jesus’ resurrection, for Saul of Tarsus as he lay blinded and perhaps bruised on the road to Damascus, was this.  The one true God had done for Jesus of Nazareth, in the middle of time, what Saul had thought he was going to do for Israel at the end of time.  Saul had imagined that YHWH would vindicate Israel after her suffering at the hand of the pagans.  Instead, he had vindicated Jesus after his suffering at the hand of the pagans….—p.36

…the word for ‘reveal’ is apokalypso, from which of course we get ‘apocalypse’….—p.37

Chapter 3: Herald of the King

…The point is that, despite what many have thought, he [Paul] did not (as it were) abandon Judaism for something else.  Here he, and we, are in a cleft stick.  If he had abandoned Judaism and invented a new religion, he would be regarded by many as anti-Jewish.  If he had claimed that Judaism’s long story had reached its climax, its fulfillment, in Jesus of Nazareth, he would be regarded by (p.39)  many as anti-Jewish.  Heads I lose; tails you win.  I think he took the second route.  Those who object to this on principle need to face the question, whether they would really have preferred him to take the first.—pp.39-40

Misunderstanding ‘Gospel’ in the Modern Church

The word ‘gospel’ and the phrase ‘the gospel’ hae come to denote, especially in certain circles within the church, something that in older (p.40) theology would be called an ordo salutis, an order of salvation.  ‘The gospel’ is supposed to be a description of how people get saved; of the theological mechanism….Conversely, if you hear a sermon in which the claims of Jesus Christ are related to the political or ecological questions of the day, some people will say that, well, perhaps the subject was interesting, but ‘the gospel’ wasn’t preached.

            The trouble is, of course, that though there are obviously difficult concepts in the New Testament, which send any intelligent reader off to the commentaries and dictionaries, there are others which are in fact equally difficult but which are not recognized as such.  If we continue to use a word that we find in the New Testament in a sense which the New Testament itself doesn’t support, that is our responsibility.  But if we then seek support for our ideas by consulting a passage where the word occurs, we are locking ourselves in to misunderstanding the text in question, and locking ourselves out from the possibility of ever really understanding what the text actually does say.—p.41

Backgrounds to Paul’s Usage

[what did ‘the gospel; mean in Paul’s world]  In order to answer this question, we must unpack it a bit.  Where did the idea come from, and what echoes did the word in consequence carry both for Paul and for his readers?  There have been two regular answers to this double question; Paul, after all, lived in more than one world (the Jewish, the Greek, the Roman, and so forth).  I suggest that these two answers have (p.41)been wrongly played off against one another, and that when we examine them both more closely we will discover that they actually belong closely together.  We are here the cutting edge of two of the central questions which, as we saw, have exercised writers on Paul for many years: how do we locate him historically, and what is the centre of his theology?

            The two backgrounds regularly proposed for Paul’s use of the Greek word euangelion (‘gospel’) and euangelizesthai (‘to preach the gospel’) are, predictably, the Hebrew scriptures on the one hand and pagan (Greco-Roman) usage on the other.  The line between the two tends to follow the old divide between those who suppose Paul to be basically a Jewish thinker and those who see him as having borrowed his fundamental ideas from Hellenism.  The evidence has been rehearsed often enough, though it is my impression that the right lessons have not always been learned from it.  We must set out the main features briefly.

            The Jewish usage of the relevant root include two well-known verses from Isaiah: [40:9 & 52:7] (p.42)….

            ….The theme of the Isaianic herald was alive and well in the first century, as part of the great theme, which continued to be cherished by Jews at the time of Jesus and Paul (and indeed right up to our own generation):  the return of Israel from exile.  For many, if not most, Jewish writers in the second-temple period (538BC—AD70), the ‘return from exile’, predicted by Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others, had not yet taken place.  This is clear, especially, in the writings from Qumran, which make explicit use…..

            For some, this evidence is quite sufficient to win the verdict: this Jewish background is the context within which the New Testament ‘gospel’ is to be understood.  Others, however, still insist upon the non-Jewish background as the vital one.  In the Greek world, as is well known among scholars, euangelion is regular technical term, referring to the announcement of a great victory, or to the birth, or accession, of an emperor.  The first and third of these could of course easily be combined, if someone became emperor by means of a great military victory.)  The coming of a new ruler meant the promise of peace, a new start for the world, not least at the time of Augustus, who became the first Roman emperor in 31 BC following a long period of civil war.  An inscription from 9BC says it all….*

…a saviour for us and those who come after us, to make war to cease, to create order everywhere…; the birthday of the god (Augustus) was the beginning for the world of the glad tidings that have come to men through him [The inscription was found in Priene on the Asia Minor coast: Priene Inscriptions, edited by F. Hiller von Gartringen, 105,40]

[…]

            I suggest that the antithesis between the two is a false one, based on the spurious either-or that has misleadingly divided New Testament studies for many years.—p.42-43

…The problem is not merely that we now know that ‘Jew’ and ‘Greek’ in the first century did not live in watertight worlds (though this itself ought to make us wary of a strict either-or).  It is, rather, that the Isaianic message always was about the enthronement of YHWH and the dethronement of pagan gods; about the victory of Israel and the fall of Babylon; about the arrival of the Servant King and the consequent coming of peace and justice…. It will not do to distinguish, as is sometimes done, between supposedly ‘sacred’ uses (Isaiah) and supposedly ‘secular’ ones (Augusts) [*see above].  As far as first-century Jews were concerned, the ‘secular’ claims of the imperial cult were in fact profoundly ‘religious’.  The Roman world, moving fast towards the divinization of its emperors, would have eagerly agreed.  And it was precisely against such ‘religious’ connotations—… that the Jews of Paul’s day had set their face.  When their God, YHWH, acted within history to deliver his people, the spurious gods of the heathen would be defeated.  If and when YHWH set up his own king as the true ruler, his true earthly representative, all other kingdoms would be confronted with their rightful overlord.—p.44

…The more Jewish we make Paul’s ‘gospel’, the more it confronts directly the pretensions of the imperial cult, and indeed all other paganisms whether ‘religious’ or secular’.  It is because of Jewish monotheism that there can be ‘no king but God’.  In the history of ideas, and in lexicography, derivation is important; but so is confrontation.  The all-embracing royal and religious claims of Caesar (or Babylon, or Persia, or Egypt, or Syria, or whoever) were directly challenged by the equally all-embracing claim of Israel’s God..  To announce that YHWH was king was to announce that Caesar is not.  This was the ‘good news’ that Isaiah’s herald was called upon to proclaim.—p.44

The Fourfold Gospel Concerning Jesus

(Romans 1:1-5) [is] Paul’s shorthand summary of what ‘the gospel ‘ actually is.

            It is not, then, a system of how people get saved.  The announcement of the gospel results in people being saved—Paul says as much a few verses later.  But ‘the gospel’ itself, strictly speaking, is the narrative proclamation of King Jesus.  He can speak equally of ‘announcing the gospel’ and of ‘announcing Jesus’, using the term kerussein, ‘to act as a herald’ in each case (e.g. I Cor. 1:23; 15:12; 2 Cor. 1:19; 4:5; 11:4; Gal. 2:2; I The. 2:9)..  When the herald makes a royal proclamation, he says ‘Nero (or whoever) has become emperor.’  He does not say ‘If you would like to have an experience of living under an emperor, you might care to try Nero.’ The proclamation is an authoritative summons to obedience—in Paul’s case, to what he calls ‘the obedience of faith’.—p.45

…The story of God and the world, he [Paul] believed, was focused on and encapsulated within the story of Jesus of Nazareth…. Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is Lord.—p.46

The crucified Jesus

It is an obvious truism to say that the cross stands at the heart of Paul’s whole theology…. The problem for anyone who attempts to think Paul’s thoughts after him is that each time he mentions the cross—as he does literally dozens of times, on almost every page of his letters—he says something different about it.  How has God fulfilled the promises to Abraham?  Through the cross…..How are Jew and Gentile reconciled?  Through the cross….And so on.—p.46

            …Crucifixes regularly appear as jewellery in today’s post-Christian Western world, and the wearers are often blissfully unaware that their pretty ornament depicts the ancient equivalent, all in one, of the hangman’s noose, the electric chair, the thumbscrew, and the rack.  Or, to be more precise, something which combined all four but went far beyond them; crucifixion was such an utterly horrible thing that the very word was usually avoided in polite Roman society.  Every time Paul spoke of (p.46) it…. He and his hearers must have been conscious of the slap in the face thereby administered to their normal expectations and sensibilities….—p.46-47

…The world of Paul’s audience knew of ‘the gospel’ as a message about someone, most likely a king or emperor, who had won a great victory, perhaps thereby attaining the throne.  Paul, with both feet planted firmly in the prophets, addressed the pagan world with the news of a new king, a new emperor, a new Lord.

            For this reason I suggest that we give priority—a priority among equals, perhaps, but still a priority—to those Pauline expressions of the crucifixion of Jesus which describe it as the decisive victory over the ‘principalities and powers’.  Nothing in the many other expressions of the meaning of the cross is lost if we put this in the centre.  The announcement of ‘the crucified Messiah’ is the key to everything because it declares to the rulers of this age that their time is up; had they realized what was going on, ‘they would not have crucified the Lord of glory’ (I Cor. 1:18-2:8).  Contrary to what casual onlookers might have thought, when Jesus was crucified it was he who was leading the principalities and power in his triumphal procession, celebrating his victory over them, instead of the other way around (Col. 2:14-15).  The death of Jesus had the effect of liberating both Jew and Gentile from the enslaving force of the ‘elements of the world’ (Gal. 4:1-11).  And, towering over almost everything else, the death of Jesus, seen as the culmination of his great act of obedience, is the means whereby the reign of sin and death is replaced with the reign of grace and righteousness (Romans 5:12-21).  ‘The gospel’ is indeed the announcement of a royal victory.—p.p.47

…in the great sweeping argument of the letter to the Romans, Paul’s exposition of God’s faithfulness to his covenant (in technical language, his ‘righteousness’), is explained in terms of the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham (3:21-4:25), and then explored in terms of the undoing of Adam’s sin (5:12-21) and ultimately of the liberation of the whole creation (8:17-25).  The same sequence of thought may be observed in various other places…. And always the fulfillment focuses on the death of Jesus, the covenant-fulfilling act, the moment when God executed judicial sentence on sin itself (Romans 3:24-26; 8:3), the moment when God’s astonishing love was unveiled in all its glory (Romans 5:6-11; 8:31-39).

            This is fulfillment; not abrogation.  It would be fatally easy to suppose that Paul acquired on the road to Damascus, or in his thinking soon after, a scheme of thought, focused on the cross, which made him want to abandon everything Jewish, including the sense that Israel’s God was going to fulfil his promises at last….The power of his ‘gospel’ came precisely from the fact that it addressed the pagan world with the full weight of Jewish history and tradition behind it….—p.48

…the shameful death of Jesus at the hands of the pagans was, for Paul, the centre and starting-point of what ‘the gospel’ was all about.  It was the fulfillment of the Isaianic message.  It was the proclamation of the ultimate royal victory.  It was the Jewish message of good news for the world.—p.49

The risen Jesus

…Paul understands Jesus’ execution as the moment when the creator’s love wins the victory over the rebellious creation, when the forces that have enslaved humans and the world are defeated once and for all.  Yet, to continue this theological see-saw process, if that victory did not lead directly to Jesus’ own resurrection, it did not happen at all…–p.49

…As far as Paul was concerned, the most important eschatological event, through which the living God had unveiled (or, if you like, ‘apocalypsed’) his plan to save the whole cosmos, had occurred when Jesus rose from the dead.  He wasn’t just living in the last days.  He was living in the first days—of a whole new world order….—p.50

…First-century Jews held a variety of beliefs about what God would do with, or to, his people after their death.  But ‘resurrection’ was never a term covering lots of different options on that score.  It had to do, specifically, with re-embodiment, with a new physical existence.  When Paul talks about a ‘spiritual body (I Cor. 15:44), he doesn’t mean ‘spiritual’ in the Platonic sense, i.e. non-material.  He means a body (physical, in some sense), which is constituted by ‘spirit’.

            …And this too had happened ‘according to the scriptures’ (I Cor. 15:4).  Once again, this doesn’t mean that Paul could dig out a handful of biblical proof-texts predicting that someone would rise again as an isolated event within history.  It means that he saw the entire biblical narrative moving this way….—p.50

King Jesus

‘Christ’ is not a name.  It is a tile.  It becomes a name (denoting somebody, but without extra connotation), at some point in early Christianity, as its Jewish meaning is forgotten by Gentile converts.  Equally, ‘Christ’ in the first century does not mean ‘a divine being’.  That, too, is a later development (as we shall see, Paul thought Jesus was divine; but the word ‘Christ’ did not express, perhaps could not have expressed, that belief).  ‘Christ’, for Paul, means ‘Messiah’.  And ‘Messiah’, of course, means ‘the anointed one’(p.51) where this is ignored (as it often is in both scholarly and popular writing) we should not be surprised to find that a good many Pauline passages remain stubbornly opaque.—p.51-52

…We know, mostly from the pages of Josephus, of a dozen or more messianic or would-be messianic movements within a hundred years either side of Jesus.  This is the atmosphere we need to breathe if we want to understand what Paul is talking about.  He believed that Jesus was the true king….—p.52

…For Paul, the reason why there is good news at all is that in and through the cross of King Jesus the one true God has dealt decisively with evil.  The prisoners can only be comforted if it is true that the jailor has himself been locked up.  Zion can only receive truly good news if it is true that Babylon has been defeated.  At the heart of Paul’s gospel there stands the claim that the death of Jesus the king has defeated evil at its very heart.—p.52

…He [Paul in Romans 1:3-4] is, in other words, announcing a gospel which is not just a message about the availability of salvation, which happens to have been achieved by someone called ‘Jesus’, whose other name (for Paul) is ‘Christ’.  He is announcing that the messaianic promises of salvation have come true in Jesus.  Jesus is the king, not only of Israel but of all the world.  When Paul proceeds at once to say exactly this in inverse 5…. (p.53) we have initial justification in saying that Romans 1:3-4 does indeed provide the thematic launching-pad for the letter’s deepest argument.  Paul’s theology in Romans is, at its heart, royal.—pp.53-54

Jesus is Lord

Paul uses the title ‘Lord’ for Jesus so frequently that the uses take up several columns in a small-print concordance.  Like Christos, though, the word Kyrios (‘Lord’), is often taken for granted, or even (perhaps as a result of its over-use in popular devotional address to God or Jesus) downgraded into almost another mere name, denoting Jesus but not saying anything much about him.  It is vial, if we want to understand all the dimensions of Paul’s gospel, that we  reclaim the full significance of this heavily freighted word.

            Like ‘gospel’ itself, ‘Lord’ carries two apparently quite different meanings, depending on whether you look towards Paul’s Jewish upbringing or his Greco-Roman audience….

            In the Greco-Roman world around which Paul moved so widely, and which formed the primary audience for his message, the word Kyrios could refer to all sorts of people.  It could sometimes simply be a polite form of address, like the English ‘Sir’.  But, just as the polite English ‘Sir’ does not rule out the stricter sense, used to address a knight, so in Paul’s world Kyrios was regularly used not merely for polite address to a social superior, but to denote the social superior above all; the emperor.  Ultimately, for the Roman point of view, there was only one Lord of the world.  According to Paul, he now had a rival.—p.56

…’Every tongue’ he [Paul] writes [in Phil 2:5-11], ‘shall confess that “Jesus is Lord”, to the glory of God the Father.’  As with ‘gospel’, so with ‘Lord’” Paul’s language is borrowed not only from Isaiah, but also from the imperial cult.  In several texts from the Roman empire, we find formulaic phrases, referring to the emperor’s accession, in which the sequence of thought runs as follows.  Such-and-such a person (Augustus, Nero, or whoever) has been a good servant of the state, perhaps by winning some great victory; we therefore hail him as our lord, and entrust ourselves to him to be our saviour.  We hail him as Kyrios, and trust him to be our Soter.

            Paul, writing to the Philippian church (Philippi was, of course, a Roman colony), cannot but have been aware of the implications of what he was saying.  Indeed, I think it is likely that this is part of his real message to the Philippian church: don’t be lulled into thinking that you can serve two masters, that there are two Lords of the world.  There is only one, and that is Jesus.  ‘Every…[Phil. 3:20-21]’.  Paul’s gospel was indeed a royal announcement.  He had not left behind the category of kingship when he went out, away from the Jewish world, to preach to the Gentiles.  That, on the contrary, was the context where the specifically Jewish message of the gospel really began to bite.  ‘Another king’—as Paul knew only too well, people tend to get put in prison for saying that sort of thing.  We should not be surprised to discover that that was where Paul was when he wrote half of his letters.—p.57

The Gospel of God

…If Saul of Tarsus had felt called, as a Pharisee, to preach to the Gentiles, this would have been part of his stock-in-trade, coupled with an invitation to worship the true God, the God of Israel, and to take on the Jewish way of life, the Torah.—p.58

Conclusion

…The royal proclamation is not simply the conveying of true information about the kingship of Jesus.  It is the putting into effect of that kingship, the decisive and authoritative summoning to allegiance.  Paul discovered, at the heart of his missionary practice, that when he announced the lordship of Jesus Christ, the sovereignty of King Jesus, this very announcement was the means by which the living God reached out with his love and changed the hearts and lives of men and women, forming them into a community of love across traditional barriers, liberating them from the paganism which had held them captive, enabling them to become, for the first time, the truly human beings they were meant to be.  The gospel, Paul would have said, is not just about God’s power saving people.  It is God’s power at work to save people.

            When Paul announced this gospel message, it carried its own weight, its own authority, quite independently of the rhetorical or linguistic skill of the herald.  But if the heralding of this gospel was the authoritative summons to allegiance, it could not but pose a challenge to all other ‘powers’ that claimed human loyalty.  That is why to retain, or to embrace, symbols and praxis which spoke of other loyalties and other allegiances was to imply that other powers were still being invoked.  And that, according to Paul, was to deny ‘the truth of the gospel’.—p.61

Chapter 4: Paul and Jesus

First-Century Jewish Monotheism

…monotheism was a fighting doctrine; one could not sit back and dismiss the rest of the world as evil, knowing one was going to escape it altogether sooner or later.  Jewish-style monotheism committed its adherents both to the effort to bring in the kingdom within the physical world (though Jews differed as to how much effort was appropriate) and to the belief that those who died ahead of the time would be raised physically to life when the great day came. Rejecting dualism, the monotheist was committed to bodily resurrection.

            Within this monotheism, many Jews … used a range of language,….

            There are five language-sets in particular which they employed for this purpose.  Briefly, they are as follows: Wisdom, Torah, Spirit, Word and Shekinah (the last is the technical term for the presence of the true God ‘tabernacling’ with his people, living in the Temple in Jerusalem as he lived in the tent of meeting in the wilderness)….—p.64

…Jewish monotheism set its face firmly against emperor-worship….

            …The Jewish war was not simply a clash between a recalcitrant rebel subject and a might imperial power.  It was a (p.64) clash between two competing worldviews.  Ultimately, there cannot be two Lords of the world.  As far as the Romans were concerned, their victory in AD70 proved their point.  As far as the Jews were concerned, the fall of Jerusalem merely heightened the problem of adhering to their monotheism, and fuelled further revolt.—pp.64-65

Jesus Within Paul’s Jewsih Monotheism

…True monotheism isn’t an opinion, a logical deduction, about God; it is being ‘known’ by the God who says to his people, Israel: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart….

            This combination of monotheistic affirmation and the command to love God takes us back to the very heart of Judaism, to the prayer, amounting to a confession of faith, said three times a day by devout Jews from Paul’s time right up to the present.  ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One, and you shall love the Lord your God…’  This is known as the Shema, from the Hebrew word for ‘Hear’ with which it opens….—p.66

…We know, he says, that no idol has any real existence (Gal. 4:8-11 again), and that there is no God but one.  That is Jewish-style monotheism, ranged classically against pagan polytheism.  Then, in typically Pauline style, never content to say a good thing once if he can expand it a bit, he continues by referring directly to, indeed quoting, the basic Jewish confession of faith, the Shema.  In contrast, he says, to the many ‘gods’ and ‘lords’ of the pagan world, for us, he says, ‘there is one God—the Father, from who are all things and we unto him—and one Lord—Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and we through him’.  To feel the full force of this, we need to set it out side by side with the text Paul has in mind:

            The Lord our God                               One God—the Father…

            The Lord is One                                  One Lord—Jesus Christ…

            (Deuteronomy 6:4)                             (I Corinthians 8:6)

Faced with that astonishing statement, one would have to say that if the early Fathers of the church hadn’t existed it would be necessary to invent them.  Paul has redefined the very meaning of the words that Jews used, every day in their regular prayers, to denote the one true God.  The whole argument of the chapter hinges precisely on his being a Jewish-style monotheist, over against pagan polytheism; and, as the lynchpin of the argument, he has (p.66) quoted the most central and holy confession of that monotheism and has placed Jesus firmly in the middle of it. Lots of Pauline scholars have tried to edge their way round this one, but it can’t be done…. All things are made by the one; all things are made through the other.—pp.66-67

…He has spied a new meaning of the word ‘God’, because the person he has firmly in view is Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and risen one.  Paul has taken the word ‘God’ itself and has filled it with new content.  Or rather, he would say, he has discovered what its true content always was.  What he knows to be true about Jesus leaves him no choice.—p.67

            The same is true in the second passage, Philippians 2:5-11 (p.67)

            We begin at the end of the passage.  There Paul declares (verses 10-11) that

At the name of Jesus every knee shall bow… and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’  Here, as in I Cor. 8:6, Paul is quoting a monotheistic text from the Old Testament.  Not just any miscellaneous monotheistic text, either.  This comes from Isaiah 40-55, where we find the clearest and most sustained scriptural exposition and exaltation of the one true God over all false claimants, and at the same time the stoutest declaration of the sovereignty of the one God, ruling out all possibility of ontological dualism.  Isaiah 45:23 declares, in the name of YHWH, Israel’s one God:  ‘To me, and me alone, every knee shall bow, every tongue swear.’  The whole point of the context is that the one true God does not, cannot and will not share his glory with anyone else.  It is his alone.  Paul, however, declares that this one God has shared his glory with—Jesus.  How can this be?  What on earth is he talking about?

            The answer is found, of course, in the first half of the poem, if poem it be (2:5-8).  Once we sort out some tricky technical language, what Paul is saying is this.

(1) Jesus was truly in the form of God, that is, he was equal with God.  But (2) he did not regard this divine equality as something to exploit (watch out for different translations that get this vital point wrong).  Instead, Paul says, (3) he offered the true interpretation of what it meant to be equal with God: he became human, and died under the weight of the sin of the world, obedient to the divine saving plan.

Why then has he been exalted, and given the name LORD? Because, quite simply, he has done what only the one true God can do.  The truth about God is revealed, for Paul, supremely on the cross.  As he says in Romans, ‘God commends his love for us, in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’  That sentence, we should note, only makes sense if, somehow, God is fully and personally involved in the death of Jesus Christ.  Paul’s speculations (if we are right to call them that) about Jesus and God did not lead him into ever more complex flights of metaphysical fancy.  They brought him face to face with the deep, utterly self-giving, utterly trustworthy, love of the covenant God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.—pp. 67-68

…Yes, says Paul: Christ became a servant, and is now exalted in the glory which the one God will not share with one other than himself.  Of course it will strain all our categories to breaking point and beyond.  But if the meaning of the word ‘God’ includes not only Jesus, but, specifically, the crucified Jesus.  And it is this new meaning of the word ‘God’ that places Paul…., into the thick of the battle between revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, and the ‘principalities and powers’; and, in particular, the pagan imperial claims of Caesar.—p. 69

            The third passage is Colossians 1:15-20 (p.69)

This time the argument hinges on the parallelism between the two halves of the poem (1:15-18a; 1:18b-20).  The poem is a classic example of Jewish monotheistic poetry, such as we find again and again in the psalms.  The Jews, faced with the might and corruption of paganism, stressed repeatedly that the creator of the world was Israel’s redeemer-God, and vice versa…. By identifying YHWH as both the creator of the cosmos and the redeemer of Israel they safeguarded all their three basic doctrines: monotheism, election and eschatology.  One God, one people of God, one future for Israel and the whole world.

            And Paul has now written a poem in exactly this vein; but the central character is not YHWH, but Jesus.  Or rather, as I think we must say, the central Character is YHWH now recognized in the human face of Jesus…. Paul has gone beyond Jewish speculation, but he is not speculating.  He is drawing conclusions from the death and resurrection of the Messiah.

            These three central passages are of vital importance.  They give the lie both to the suggestion that Paul did not, after all, identify Jesus very closely with the one God of Jewish monotheism, and to the opposite suggestion, that Paul was a Hellenist who, in divinizing Jesus, broke completely away from Jewish monotheism and invented, in effect, a new form of paganism.  Neither of these will do.

These three passages do not stand alone.  Once we have grasped the point which is, I think, seen clearest in them, dozens of other pieces of data cry out to be mentioned.  In particular, we might note Paul’s use of the phrase ‘Son of God’. In Judaism, this usually refers either to Israel or, more specifically, to the king.  It in no way suggests that the person concerned is part of the very being of God himself.  For Paul, to, it remains true that the phrase still carries overtones of royal messiahship, and of Israel’s identity as YHWH’s true Son.  Bui, equally, there should be no doubt that he has (p.70) rethought the phrase, so that now, when he uses it, it means far more than previous Jews had meant by it.  When he speaks of God ‘sending his Son’, in Galatians 4 and Romans 8; when he combines ‘father’ and ‘son’ in formulae, and indeed when he speaks of God as ‘father’ in close conjunction with a mention of Jesus Christ—then it appears that, for him, ‘Son of God’ has become a technical term with a new meaning.  If we allow Paul to use his terms in his own way, I believe we are forced to conclude that the phrase meant both the Messiah, in whom Israel’s destiny is summed up and the one who is sent, like Wisdom, from the creator, to accomplish his saving purposes.  Paul discovered that in the language of messiahship there lay a hidden, hitherto unexploited potential.  There is no tension, for him, between Jesus being the totally human Messiah, the representative of Israel, and the one who is sent as it were from God’s side, to do and be what only God can do and be.  Paul, in short, seems to have held what generations of exegetes have imagined to be an impossibility; a thoroughly incarnational theology, grounded in a thoroughly Jewish worldview.

The same point can be made through the word Kyrios or ‘Lord’….It is also clear, from a good many of the passages where Paul uses this word of Jesus (including, of course, two of those we have just examined), that it is for him a way of aligning Jesus personally, one-on-one, with the word Kyrios in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible), where it regularly stands for YHWH, the not-to-be-pronounced Name of God.  ‘All who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved’. That verse (Romans 10:13) refers clearly to calling on the name of Jesus, to confessing Jesus specifically as Kyrios (10:9) and believing that God raised him from the dead.  Yet the verse is a direct quotation from the prophet Joel (2:32 or 3:5 in the Greek version), where the natural assumption is that ‘the Lord’, Kyrios, is YHWH himself.  Paul is not stupid.  Again and again he is making the point, cryptically, which emerges into the light in the three passages we have examined more extensively, and in such startling throwaway lines as Romans 9:5, which introduces and prefigures precisely the point of 10:9-13: from the Jewish race comes the Messiah according to the flesh—who is also God over all, blessed for ever.  (The attempts of worried scholars to find alternative ways of understanding this verse remain profoundly unconvincing.)

It was Paul’s belief and contention, then, that at the heart of Jewish monotheism—within the oneness of the one God—lay a plurality, a (p.71) reciprocal relationship.  This, of course, strained at the borders of human language, even the God-given language of scripture; but one could clearly recognize ‘the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6)….

…He remained, in other words, at the centre of the map of Jewish monotheism.  But, inside that monotheism itself, he had discovered Jesus: the crucified, risen and enthroned Jesus, the Lord of the word.  And, intending to remain the most loyal of Jews, worshipping the one God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he worshipped this Jesus.

Paul say the human Jesus as the revelation of the one God.  It mattered to him that this human being Jesus remained human,  now that he was enthroned as the Lord of the world.  But Jewish monotheism spoke of the one God dwelling with his people, animating, sustaining them, giving them life and hope.  Theological reasons, as well as deep personal experience, therefore drove Paul to develop a further discovery at the heart of Jewish monotheism: the Spirit of God, also recognized as the Spirit of Jesus.—pp.69-72

The Spirit Within Paul’s Jewish Monotheism

…redeemed people [Gal. 4:8-11] now truly know the true God, or rather have been known by him; in other words, this Father-Son-Spirit combination is the true revelation of who the one true God is, which puts all other claimants to deity in the shade.  Here, of course, Paul is able to draw not only on the Jewish language of wisdom, the one who is sent from the creator, but also on the language of Spirit itself, from various Jewish writings beginning with Genesis (1:2).  The Spirit is not a being other than the one true God; to speak of God acting through his Spirit is to speak of God himself acting.

            The second passage in which the key idea of  ‘God’ is redefined in relation to the Spirit is I Corinthians 12:4-6.  Here the context is very different, but the message is the same.  Paul wants to stress to the Corinthians that, despite the diversity of functions and gifts in the church, there is only one God.  Unity is his theme, and he stresses it throughout the chapter. But when he actually introduces the theme, it is a threefold unity of which he speaks:

            There are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit;

            varieties of ministry, but the same Lord;

            varieties of working, but it is the same God working all in all.

Within the very stress on unity, Paul manages to suggest that this unity subsists in threefold form, and that these three are Spirit, Lord and God.  But we should not make the mistake of thinking that Spirit and Lord are not, for him, also in some sense ‘God’, as we have already seen.  He is at the borders of language, and his use of his won terms reflects the fact.  The closer we get to his own terms, the more we discover that his view of God is (we have either to use the word or find a direct equivalent) Trinitarian.  It is emphatically not tritheist; there is only one God, as for Jewish monotheism.  It is emphatically not pantheist; this God is not identified with the world.  It is emphatically not Deist; this god is not distant or detached, but closely involved with the world.  It is emphatically not modalist; the three are really distinct, since the middle term is the human being Jesus, who prayed to the (p.73) Father as Father, and who, for Paul, is no longer physically present in the same way as once he was.  Paul does not solve the puzzle of how God can be three and one at the same time.  But, for him, this is what the word God actually means.  Even when he is using ‘God’ to denote the first member of the three, this member is now defined in and by his intimate relation to the other two.  The creator is known as the Father of Jesus, as the sender of the Spirit.

The third and final passage about the Spirit introduces another major item into the discussion.  In Romans 8:1-11, one of the great central passages for all of Pauline theology, we find Christ and the Spirit together doing what the Torah could not (verse 3)….

As the passage goes on, though, another aspect of this complex Jewish understanding of God-working-in-the=world becomes apparent.  God sent his Son and his Spirit (like Wisdom in Ben-Sira 24) to do what Torah could not (Torah is identified with Wisdom in the same passage in Ben-Sira).  The result is that the Spirit now indwells those who are in Christ (Romans 8:5-11).  But this language of ‘indwelling’ comes directly from the third element in the same passage in Ben-Sira.  There, Wisdom and Torah are identified with the Shekinah, the presence of the living God tabernacling in the Temple in Jerusalem, dwelling in the midst of his people.  Paul is here ascribing to the Spirit that which was said YHWH himself, living in the Temple. Paul has taken three of the ways in which good first-century Jewish monotheists conceived of the one true God acting within the world, and specifically within Israel; and he used exactly these modes of speaking to describe what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit.

            …When Paul wants to speak of the ways in which the Son and the Spirit are related to the transcendent God who is beyond space and time, he uses exactly those language systems which some parts of Judaism had developed for speaking, within monotheism, of the ways in which this one God acted within the world. Paul remains completely a Jewish-style monotheist; but (p.74) the one God is now known as God, Lord and Spirit; or Father, Lord, and Spirit; or God, Son, and Spirit; or various other combinations.  For Paul, the very meaning of  ‘God’ itself has been unpacked by and redefined in relation to the events and, if you like, the persons, of Jesus and the Spirit.—pp. 73-75

Paul, Jesus and God

It should be clear by now that when Paul went out into the Gentile world with his ‘gospel’, he went as a Jew to Gentiles, to tell the Gentile world what Jews had always believed: that ‘the gods of the nations are idols, but our God made the heavens’ (Psalm 96:5).  But he had now been grasped by a new vision of God, which meant that the traditional statement could never be made casually or dismissively, with a sense of effortless racial superiority.  The one God, the creator, had now been made known in and as Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and risen Messiah, the Lord of the world.  The face that called the world into existence was turned at last towards the world in self-revelation, in rescue, in love.  The  wind that swept over the waters of creation was blowing again, to bring to life things that were dead, to call into existence things that did not exist.  This was a message, a thoroughly Jewish message, that the Gentile world urgently needed to hear.  Paul believed himself called to be the means of bringing this about.—p. 75

Chapter 5  Good News for the Pagans

            To begin with, a word about a word.  We have learnt that there is no such thing as ‘first-century Judaism’, only first-century Judaisms, plural; the same is of course true in the non-Jewsih world.  What, after all, has Cicero in common with the worshippers of Diana at Ephesus, or Juvenal with either?  The word ‘pagan’ is a convenient early Christian label to cover, as they might have said, a multitude of sins, much as the Jewish word ‘Gentile’ had done.  Originally ‘pagan’ meant either a civilian (as opposed to a soldier) or a rustic (as opposed to a city-dweller).  The former is the more likely derivation for the developed Christian meaning.—p.78

Derivation and Confrontation.

…The direction of Paul’s message was confrontation with paganism; he had good news for them, but it was good news which undermined their worldview and replaced it with an essentially Jewish one, reworked around Jesus….—p.79

            None of Paul’s letters, of course, is addressed to a non-Christian pagan audience.  The recipients are all Christian.  Usually, they are Pauline Christians, though of course Romans at least is an exception, since Paul has not visited the church (this goes for Colossians, too)….—p.79

…Recent scholarly debates about the nature of Pauline theology have tried to come to terms with the fact that this is what we have to do if we are not to allow the letters to collapse into simply a list of different ‘theologies’.  This discussion, in my experience, often gets bogged down, partly because many Pauline scholars are not equipped philosophically to handle the necessary questions of method, and partly because the debate regularly gets stuck on traditional issues such as justification and the law, and, in current discussion, over such questions as whether Paul was or was not a ‘covenantal theologian’, an ‘apocalyptic theologian’, or some combination of the two.  I suggest that, instead of looking for an abstract theological framework which we can hypothesize and into which we can fit, or from which we can ‘derive’, the various specifics of the different letters, we would do far better to go in search of Paul’s work among the pagans, including, but going beyond, his preaching and teaching.  This was the controlling and guiding aim of his life.  It may perhaps be the keystone refused by the builders which will nevertheless hold the arch together.  This proposal is, I submit, at least worth a try.—p.80

…Many scholars, seeing that Paul is critical of Judaism, have assumed that he must therefore have a non-Jewish theology.  Many others, seeing that his theology was thoroughly Jewish, have then found it puzzling to explain how he came to hold a critique of Judaism.  What the history-of-religions method, with its lines of derivation, is bad at discovering is polemical engagement on the one hand and critique from within on the other.  Both, I suggest, play vital roles in Paul’s missionary proclamation.—p.80

Polemical Engagement

By ‘polemical engagement’ I mean that Paul becomes, as he says, all things to all people (I Cor. 9:22).  He does not shout his message across a yawning cultural gap….—p.80

…in 2 Corinthians 10:5, that of ‘taking every thought captive to obey Christ’.  This line of thought has been explored often enough in terms of Paul picking up his opponents’ slogans in order to do something new with them.  What is not so often noted is precisely what it is that he does with them.  He seems to have believed what he (or someone else) wrote in Colossians 1:17—all things were created through Christ and for Christ.  He need not be afraid, then, in taking over, and using, key concepts from opposing systems of thought.

            This does not lessen his opposition to the system in question.  It does not mean that he has compromised, that he has taken a step down the slippery slope towards syncretism….whatever faults Paul may have had, syncretism was not one of them.  But Paul’s theology of creation was sufficiently robust for this not to be a problem.  He took the high ground: al truth was, for him, God’s truth, and when he took on an idea from pagan culture he made sure it was well and truly baptized before it could join the family.  He claimed the high ground of the creational monotheist, not the split-level world of the worried dualist.  Confrontation does not simply mean head-to-head total disagreement.—p.81

…But Paul was no dualist. As we shall see, at the heart of his polemical engagement with paganism was a radical and deep-rooted affirmation of the goodness of the created world, and, with that, of the possibility that pagans, and their ideas and beliefs, could be redeemed by the Christ through whom the world was made in the first place.  Hence, good news for the pagans; not the sort of good news that told them they were more or less all right as they were, but the sort of good news which told them that, though they were at present going about things in a totally wrong way, the God who made them loved them and longed to remake them.—p.81

…the mission to the Gentiles was the natural corollary of Paul’s belief that in the events of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and the coming of the Spirit, the promises of Israel’s restoration had in fact been fulfilled, in however initially paradoxical a fashion.  If these things had happened, the New Age had dawned, and it was time for the Gentiles to come in.  The God of Israel had called Israel into being in order to save the world; that was the purpose of election in the first place.  The death and resurrection of the Messiah were not odd new events, bolts from the blue; in retrospect, they were to be seen as the coping-stone of the divine plan, which was always for the real exodus, not only of Israel, but of the whole world.—p.82

…He did not have to make the Jewish message into an essentially Gentile message for it to be audible or comprehensible to his pagan hearers; this old assumption, which still dominates Pauline scholarship in some quarters, is thoroughly misleading and unhistorical.  What the Gentiles needed was precisely the Jewish message, or rather the Jewish message as fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah.  The whole older history-of-religions movement trembles at the thought of a Jewish message for a pagan world; yet that, for thoroughly comprehensible reasons, is what Paul offers.

            The nature of this polemical engagement is thus that Paul is claiming the high ground from his pagan hearers.  The Jewish message is precisely not that there is another god to choose from among so many, another set of (p.82) religious practices to take their stand in the market-place.  The Jewish message, as we shall presently see, focused of course on monotheism, and this monotheism was of a particular variety, namely creational and covenantal monotheism, as opposed to the pantheism of the Stoics, or the syncretistic monotheism achieved by lumping all or most of the pagan deities together, or the henotheism of those who worshipped one of the pagan deities and called them ‘the one’….The message, paradoxically, had to remain essentially Jewish if it was to have its proper relevance to the pagans.  If it had been translated into pagan categories it would have competed with them for their own turf.  It would have made YHWH one God among the other gods.  By remaining what it was, it claimed the high ground of genuine creational monotheism.

            Paul’s polemical engagement with paganism, however, was not exactly like a non-Christian Jewish engagement might have been.  It involved, as its reflex, a critique of Judaism.  But it was not a critique from outside, from a pagan standpoint.  It was a critique from within.—82-83

Critique from Within

…The prophet does not criticize Israel from a non-Jewish standpoint; he claims to represent Israel’s true vocation and belief, calling her back to an allegiance to her God from which she had declined…. The prophet’s task is to speak from the heart of the tradition, to criticize and warn those who, claiming to represent the tradition, are in fact abandoning it.—p.83

…His critique of Israel should not be read as a denial of the doctrine of election, a rejection of the belief that the Jewish people were chosen by the (p.83) one true God to be his means of saving the world.  The critique is, rather, the cutting edge of that doctrine, seen from the point of view of the Jew who believes that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Messiah around whom Israel is now defined…. His point is that Israel, the chosen people, has failed to accomplish the mission to which she was called.  That is, Israel as a whole has failed; Israel’s representative, the Messiah, Jesus, has succeeded.  As we shall see, deep at the heart of what Paul believes about Jesus is that he was the true, representative Israelite.—pp.83-84

…Moses pleaded with God for an Israel that was becoming pagan, worshipping the golden calf and behaving accordingly.  Paul sees himself as doing the same.—p.84

…She [Israel] is, Paul reckons, in danger of making herself simply a nation ‘like all the others’.  Blood and soil were the marks of pagan nations; Israel was using Torah and circumcision to emphasize exactly those things.  Thus her circumcision had become mere pagan-style mutilation (Phi. 3:2); her adherence to Torah had become mere pagan-style allegiance to principalities and powers (Gal. 4:8-11); and her whole system stood condemned as being now driven by the ‘Adamic’ nature that made Adam’s trespass to abound in the very place (i.e. Israel) where Torah was given (Romans 5:20, 7:7-25).  When Paul coins somewhat contemptuous puns to make this point (for instance, katatome, ‘mutilation’, for peritome, ‘circumcision’, in Phi.3:2), this is not mere angry invective.  It is the equivalent of what would happen today if a would-be loyal Jew, living in the land of Israel and yearning for a just peace with all her neighbours, were to look out on the work of right-wing activists and refer to them as the ‘Unsettlers’.  It is a way of pointing out that extreme zeal has a (p.84) habit of achieving the opposite end from that which it is ostensibly seeking.  It is a critique from within.—pp.83-84

…Saul’s zeal had two focal points.  First, it meant relentless opposition to the paganism which surrounded and infiltrated his Jewish world.  Second, it meant zealous promotion of Torah observance among his Jewish contemporaries, even to the extent of violence against those who were compromising.  I have now suggested that Paul the Christian retained this dual focus, but with a radical change of emphasis in both.  He still saw the message of the true God as challenging the false gods.  He still saw the great mass of Judaism as being disloyal to the true God, and needing to be brought into line.  But the line in question was now the Christian, the fulfilled-Israel, line.  Paul’s zeal to confront the pagans with the message of the true God, and his critique of his fellow Jews as the reflex of that confrontation, retain the shape of the zeal of Saul of Tarsus.  But now the God for whom he is zealous is seen in a very different light.  Now, he would say—I have a zeal for God, but it is according to knowledge; because in Christ I know God, or rather am known by him (comparing Romans 10:2 and I Cor. 8:2-3).—p.85

The Challenge: Reality and Parody

…But the basic features of paganism were deeply engrained in the lives and habits of ordinary people.  Sacrifice, holy days, oracles, inspection of auspices, mystery-cults, and a good deal else besides were part of the daily world of Paul’s audience.  My sense is that the pagan world was no more ‘ready for the gospel’, in that sense, than the Jewish would was ready to hear the news of a crucified Messiah.

            Paul’s challenge to the pagan world was not, then, a matter of filling in a set of blanks in a system already conscious of them.  It was a matter of announcing a truth which, from Paul’s point of view, was the reality of which paganism was the parody.  I suggest six areas in which this will have been the case;….

God and creation

…he remains firmly within the boundaries of Jewish-style creational monotheism, while at the same time exploring and celebrating the inner being of the one God in (p.86) terms of Creator, Lord and Spirit, or of Father, Lord and Spirit, or of Creator, Son and Spirit, or whatever.  This is perhaps one of the most basic things that a pagan audience would have picked up: Paul stood over against the multiplicity of gods with the news of the one God, and stood over against the divinization of creation with the news of the createdness of creation—without any suggestion that creation was therefore less than good..

Cult and religion

…The eucharist is, for Paul, the feast which shows that the church is the true exodus community.  But, precisely at the same time, the eucharist is the feast which challenges the tables of the demons as realities challenge parodies.  When confronted with paganism, Pauline theology does not collapse into dualism, leaving paganism with the high ground of celebrating creation.  Rather, Paul sees the crucifixion of Jesus, and the Christian celebration of that event, as being the final truth towards which paganism, seen with maximum generosity, could be said to be straining.  Paul has not derived his view of the eucharist from the pagan mysteries or sacrificial cults.  It grows directly from its Jewish roots.  But, just for that reason, it offers itself as the reality of which pagan cults are the shadowy parody. (p.87)

Power and empire

…Kyrios Kaisar was the formula which said it all: Caesar is Lord.

            …And Paul said: no, Kyrios Iesous Christos: Jesus Christ is Lord….

            ….The Jewish derivation thus generates the confrontation with paganism.  The powers of the world are confronted with the one who is the true Lord of all. (p.88)

True humanness

…He saw paganism as a self-destructive mode of being human.  He offered instead a way of being human which, based firmly on its Jewish foundations, had been reworked in the light of Jesus and the Spirit.  This way of life, he believed, would truly do what, prior to his conversion, he had always supposed the Torah would do, namely, take on paganism and beat it on its own ground.  In his theology of community, he replaced the Roman empire (under the rule of the ironically styled ‘prince of peace’) with the imperium of Jesus Christ, the true Prince of Peace, whom to serve means living in love with all one’s brothers and sisters.  If Jesus offered his hearers a counter-Temple movement, Paul offered his a counter-empire movement.  No wonder people thought him dangerous.

The true story of the world

…The Christian story, to be sure, functions as ‘myth’ in the sense that it is the story told by the community to explain and sustain its common life.  But, unlike the myths of Greece and Rome, the story told by Paul and the others only made sense insofar as it was the true story, the story of things that actually happened in recent history in the real world.  Paul was inviting his hearers to come to terms with reality: not just a ‘spiritual’ reality in the sense of an otherworldly, invisible reality, or a private ‘spiritual’ experience, but with the earthly reality, the flesh-and-blood reality, of Jesus of Nazareth and his death and resurrection….. (p.89)

…Already it should be clear that Paul’s gospel to the pagan was not a philosophy of life.  Nor was it, even, a doctrine about how to get saved.  It was a list of facts; not uninterpreted facts, of course, since no such things exist, but a list of events set within a framework which makes their import clear.  What has the pagan world to do with the strange events concerning Jesus of Nazareth?  Answer: they are not simply odd Jewish occurrences, but are the fulfillment of the creator’s plan for the whole cosmos….The Jewish framework of interpretation within which Paul understands and expounds the death and resurrection of Jesus is, of course, apocalyptic: that is, these events carry cosmic significance.  This is the good news for the pagans: that the creator of the world will be all in all, by defeating evil and death and claiming the world as his own.

            Paul is, in other words, once more claiming the high ground.  This is ironic, considering the way in which ‘apocalyptic’ has often been regarded as dualistic.  The whole world belongs to the one true God, who is now reclaiming it…. (p.90) Nor is Paul rejecting the world as it stands, as though the Christian gospel were a form of dualism.  He is saying, as he says extensively in Romans 8, that the whole creation is longing for its exodus, and that when God is all in all even the division between heaven and earth, God’s space and human space, will be done away with (as we see also in Revelation 21).  Paul’s message to the pagan world is the fulfilled-Israel message: the one creator God is, through the fulfillment of his covenant with Israel, reconciling the world to himself.  This involves, it seems, a triple exodus.  Israel is redeemed, in the person of Jesus, for the sake of the world.  Humankind is redeemed, through Jesus, so that the image of God may be restored.  Thus creation itself is redeemed, and the creator God will be all in all.

Philosophy and metaphysics

            In his famous book On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero outlines the three serious philosophical options open to a thinking person in the Greco-Roman world of the first century BC.  You could be a Stoic: that is, you could be a monist or pantheist, believing that everything that exists is some who either divine or impregnated with the divine. You could be an Epicurean: that is, you could believe that, though the gods may exist, they are a long way away from us, and do not concern themselves with our world.  (The best thing you can then do is to order your life to give yourself the least trouble and most quiet contentment.)  Or you could be, as Cicero was himself, an Academician, taking the skeptical view that we can’t really know about these things too much anyway, and the best thing to do is simply to keep up the old pagan cultic practices, the sacrifices, the auguries and so forth (Cicero himself was, like many other highly placed Romans, a cult official), and hope that society somehow holds together around them.  It didn’t, of course, and Cicero was himself the victim of its disintegration.  But what would Paul have said, had he read Cicero’s book?

            It’s an interesting question—I don’t know why there isn’t a whole monograph on the subject.  Basically, I think he would have said to Cicero (p.91) himself, as a skeptical Academician, that he was right to be skeptical about the fantastic and often laughable claims that are regularly made for the gods of the pagan pantheon.  One can’t indeed know very much about them, because they either don’t exist or are disguises for shadowy and demonic forces.  But he would have insisted that one can indeed know for sure about the one true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; one can know about him, even beyond the borders of Israel, because he has revealed himself to all in raising Jesus from the dead, and in establishing through the Spirit of Jesus a family in which all humans are equally welcome, a family destined to inherit the word.

            To the Stoic, Paul would have agreed that the world is indeed a place where God’s power and beauty are seen.  But he would have insisted that this is not because the world itself is in some sense divine, but because it is the good creation of the good and wise God— and because this God intends to flood all creation with his presence, so that the world, like a chalice, is beautiful not because of what it is but because of what it is designed to be filled with.

            To the Epicurean, Paul would have agreed that the true God was indeed different from the world, not to be identified or confused with it.  But he would have strongly denied that this true God was distant from, or unconcerned with, the world.  Rather, in the history of Israel and supremely in Jesus Christ, he is passionately and compassionately involved with the world.  The Sceptic, the Stoic and the Epicurean would thus be confronted with Paul’s essentially Jewish theology, redrawn around Christ and the Spirit…. (p.92)

Conclusion

            Like Saul of Tarsus, Paul believed, first, that the god of Israel had a quarrel with paganism.  But instead of wanting to defeat paganism with its own weapons, i.e. violence and racial prejudice, Paul the apostle believed it was his task to announce to the pagan world that the true God had revealed himself in his crucified and risen Son, thereby summoning the whole world to repentance….

            Second, like Saul of Tarsus, Paul the apostle believed that the God of Israel also had a quarrel with those of Israel who were disloyal…. Paul believed it was his task so to win over the Gentile world into the family of Abraham—so to graft unnatural branches into the natural olive tree—that the true family, the natural branches, would be made jealous and want to return to the privileges they had spurned when they rejected, and continued to reject, their God-sent Messiah (Romans 11) […]

            But, unlike Saul, Paul believed that the great act had already occurred. Instead of a great military victory over Rome, Jesus as the representative Israelite had won a great victory over sin and death…. This great act did indeed tell the pagan world that it was wrong, and that it was time to bow the knee before the true God.  But it did so in a way which left the Jew as humbled as the pagan before the revelation of God’s grace.

            …who was a member of the true people of God.  For Saul, the badge was Torah … For Paul…. (p.93) who belonged to the true people of God was quite simply faith: faith in the God who sent his Son to die and rise again for the sake of the whole world…. The doctrine of ‘justification by faith’ becomes crucially relevant in Paul’s mission to the pagan world.  It was not the message he would announce on the street to the puzzled pagans of (say) Corinth; it was not the main thrust of his evangelistic message.  It was the thing his converts most needed to know in order to be assured that they really were part of God’s people.

…the Western world is moving rapidly towards various new forms of paganism… The church, ironically enough, has often majored on the message that Paul had, not to the pagans, but to the world of Judaism.  That remains important.  But we do not have to tell our hearers to become Jews in order that they may then be confronted by Paul’s gospel.  If we want to address our own generation with the message of Jesus Christ, we need to rediscover the way in which that gospel really is good news for a pagan world.  Paul is very zealous about that, if only we will listen to him.-p.94

Chapter 6 Good News for Israel

            One initial note about language.  English speakers need to bear in mind, throughout this and the following chapter, that there are two quite different English roots which regularly translate the same Greek root.  Dikaios means ‘righteous’, but also ‘just’.  Dikaiosune means ‘righteousness’, but also ‘justice’.  Unfortunately, when we come to the cognate verb, dikaioun, we can say ‘to justify’, but we cannot, in normal English usage, say ‘to righteous’.  (E.P. Sanders has tried this, but the habit has not caught on; an older English form, ‘to rightwise’, was used in the translation of Bultmann’s New Testament Theology, but this, too, has not been taken up subsequently.)  This would not matter so much if we could always say ‘just’ and ‘justice’ instead of (p.95) ‘righteous’ and ‘righteousness’.  But, though the latter pair are themselves misleading in their current English meaning, the former would be even more so.  The problem—typical of many that meet the reader of Paul at every turn—is of course that Paul is writing in Greek, but aware of the Hebrew scriptures that stand behind what he wants to say; and that we are writing in English, vainly attempting to find words and phrases which catch the flavour and emphasis of what was already a subtle and intricate train of thought.  It is like translating poetry.  Maybe that is actually what we are trying to do.—pp.95-96

Covenant, Law court and Eschatology

…At the heart of ‘God’s righteousness’ is his covenant with Israel, the covenant through which he will address and solve the problem of evil in and for the whole world.—p.97

…But the righteousness they [Israel] have will not be God’s own righteousness.  That makes no sense at all.  God’s own righteousness is his covenant faithfulness, because of which he will (Israel hopes) vindicate her, and bestow upon her the status of ‘righteous’, as the vindicated or acquitted defendant.   But God’s righteousness remains, so to speak, God’s own property.  It is the reason for his acting to vindicate his people.  It is not the status he bestows upon them in so ding.—p.99

            But what is this hope?  God’s righteousness is what Israel invokes when she is in trouble, in the hope that God will vindicate her in the future.  But who is this Israel who will be vindicated?  Is it all Jews, or only some?  Can one tell in the present who precisely will be vindicated when God finally acts in fulfillment of his righteousness, of his covenant obligations?  Yes, reply many Jews of Paul’s day.  The present sign of our future vindication consists in our present loyalty to the covenant obligations laid upon us by our God.  Our ‘works of the law’ demonstrate in the present that, when God acts, we will be seen to be his people.  Thus there arises that theology of ‘justification by works’ which Paul was at such pains to demolish….—p.99

Options for a Key Term

…If the righteousness is something humans have ‘from God’, is it ‘imputed’ to them—that is, ‘reckoned’ to be theirs, almost as a legal fiction?  Or is it ‘imparted’, given as an actual entity r property, given by God breathing into his people that ‘righteousness’ which he longs to see?  This question has been endlessly debated for hundreds of years, and obviously depends on two quite different meanings of ‘righteousness’: the first sees it as a status, the second as a quality.

            …Is this ‘righteousness’, then, a natural quality, or a special gift from God?—p.102

‘God’s Righteousness’ in Paul’s Letters

Romans

            By the time we reach verse 20 of chapter 3, Paul has demonstrated not only that the Gentile world is out of touch with its creator God, and in consequence under judgment, but also that the Jews, too, despite being given the covenant through which God intended to redeem the world, have failed in their task.  All humankind is thus in the dock in God’s metaphorical law court.  In terms of the law-court diagram, it is no longer the case of Israel coming before God as the plaintiff, bringing a charge against the pagans.  Gentile and Jew alike are now guilty defendants.  In terms of the covenant scenario for which the law-court scene is the vital metaphor, God intended to be faithful to his covenant, his intention was to vindicate Israel and so to save the whole world, through the faithfulness of Israel; but Israel as a whole were faithless.  What is God to do?

            Paul’s answer is that the Messiah, King Jesus, has been the true, faithful Israelite.  Underneath the dense theology of the passage just quoted stands Paul’s central gospel scene: the death and resurrection of Jesus, seen as the point at which, and the means by which, God’s covenant purposes for Israel, that is, his intention to deal once and for all with the sin of the world, would finally be accomplished….—p.106

… ‘the faithfulness of Jesus’ (which later, in Romans 5, Paul can also refer to as ‘the obedience of Jesus’) is thus the means whereby the righteousness of God is revealed.  God who has made promises and kept them.  In terms of the law-court metaphor, he has been true to his word, he has been impartial (note the way in which Paul goes on at once to speak of God’s even-handed dealing with Jew and Gentile alike), and he has dealt with sin.  He also thereby vindicated the helpless: he is ‘the justifier of the one who has faith’.  This theme of God’s own righteousness, understood as his covenant faithfulness, and seen in terms of the law-court metaphor, is the key to this vital passage. [Romans 3:21-26]—p.107

…God’s righteousness is God’s own righteousness.  In this crucial passage in Romans 3 [21-26], he shows how God has been righteous in all the senses we outlined earlier.  He has been true to the covenant, which always aimed to deal with the sin of the world; he has kept his promises; he has dealt with sin on the cross; he has done so impartially, making a way of salvation for Jew and Gentile alike; and he now, as the righteous judge, helps and saves the helpless who cast themselves on his mercy.  If you give to any of the occurrences of the phrase dikaiosune theou in this passage a meaning other than some combination of A1b and A2a [‘covenant faithfulness’ & acts of covenant faithfulness] (as many translations do), the whole thing will get muddled.  If you leave it clearly referring to these senses throughout everything becomes clear.—p.107

Romans 9-10

…Israel, says Paul, is ignorant of what God has righteously and faithfully been doing in her history.  In seeking to establish a status of righteousness, of covenant membership, which will be for Jews and Jews only, she has not submitted to God’s righteousness.  The covenant always envisaged a worldwide family; Israel, clinging to her own special status as the covenant-bearer, has betrayed the purpose for which that covenant was made.  It is as though the postman were to imagine that all the letters in his bag were intended for him.—p.108

Romans 1:17

…when Paul announces that Jesus Christ is Lord, the Lord of the world, he is in that very act and announcement unveiling before the world the great news that the one God of all the world has been true to his word, has dealt decisively with the evil that has invaded his creation, and is now restoring justice, peace and truth.

            This is the fundamental thing that Paul wants the Roman church, and indeed the whole world, to grasp.  What happened in the events concerning Jesus was not a puzzling or peculiar turn of circumstances, but was the outworking of God’s age-old plan and purpose.  If the church in Rome can grasp this, they will be in exactly the right position both to support the urgent missionary work which must now take place, and to live as the one people of God, putting aside their cultural distinctions so that they can worship and serve the one God as brothers and sisters….—p.109

Conclusion: The God of Israel and of the World

I have argued throughout this chapter and chapter 4 that Paul re-thought the very meaning of the word ‘God’ by means of Jesus and the Spirit.  There is one great theme which I have not explicitly mentioned, but which I now wish in conclusion to unveil, so to speak, as the very heart of this whole rethinking on Paul’s part.

            Paul speaks, in one of the speeches in Acts, of ‘the gospel of the grace of God’ (Acts 20:24).  This is, after all, the great theme of the greatest of the letters, which we have studied very briefly in the present chapter.  Romans is often regarded as an exposition of judicial, or law-court, theology.  But that is a mistake.  The law court forms a vital metaphor at a key stage of the argument.  But at the heart of Romans we find a theology of love.

            We have seen continually that Paul’s redefinition, his fresh understanding, of the one true God came especially through his grasp of the fact that this God was revealed supremely in Jesus, and there supremely in the cross.  If we leave the notion of ‘righteousness’ as a law-court metaphor only, as so many have done in the past, this gives the impression of a legal transaction, a cold piece of business, almost a trick of thought performed by a God who is logical and correct but hardly one we would want to worship.  But if we understand ‘God’s righteousness’, as I have tried to do, in terms of the covenant faithfulness of God, then there is of course one word which sums up that whole train of thought, and which for Paul perfectly describes the God he knows in Jesus Christ and by the Spirit.  In Romans 5 and 8, drawing together the threads of the argument so far, he says that the cross of Jesus reveals supremely the love of God (5:6-11; 8:31-39).  If you understand dikaiosune theou in the way I have suggested, you cannot play off justice and love against one another.  God’s justice is his love in action, to right the wrongs of his suffering world by taking their weight upon himself.  God’s love is the driving force of his justice, so that it can never become a blind or (p.110) arbitrary thing, a cold system which somehow God operates, or which operates God.  Because the gospel reveals this covenant love, this covenant faithfulness, of the living God, Paul knows that whatever happens the future is secure.  He can announce the gospel in the face of the powers of the world, and they can do their worst to him.  The death and resurrection of Jesus have unveiled the faithful love of God, and nothing can separate him from it: 8:38-39

The language of theology, properly understood, gives birth to the language of love.  Paul has no problem about a split between head and heart, or between right-brain and left-brain.  He has grasped the truth that the one true God is now made known in Jesus and the Spirit.  And, grasping that, he knows that he is himself grasped, held, sustained and saved by the faithful love of the faithful God.

            But if the true God is as Paul has now perceived him, revealed in Jesus Christ and in the Spirit, this means that Paul’s knowledge of this God can never be a private thing.  It is something that by its very nature is shared with a whole community, and flows into a new vocation.  How he conceived of this community, its origin, its nature, and its defining unity, and how he conceived of this vocation, this mission—that is the question of justification…..—pp.110-11

Chapter 7 Justification and the Church

What is ‘Justification’?

…In terms of the place of justification within Paul’s thought, I have already indicated that it cannot be put right at the centre, since that place is already taken by the person of Jesus himself, and the gospel announcement of his sovereign kingship.  But this does not mean that justification becomes a secondary, still less an inessential, matter….—p.114

…I must insist, right away, that if you come upon anyone who genuinely thinks that they can fulfil Pelagius’ programme, in whichever form or variation you like, you should gently but firmly set them right.  There is simply no way that human beings can make themselves fit for the presence or salvation of God….

            But if we come to Paul with these questions in mind—the questions about how human beings come into a living and saving relationship with the living and saving God—it is not justification that springs to his lips or pen.  When he describes how persons, finding themselves confronted with the act of God in Christ, come to appropriate that act for themselves, he has a clear train of thought, repeated at various points.  The message about Jesus and his cross and resurrection—‘the gospel’, in terms of our previous chapters—is announced to them; through this means, God works by his Spirit upon their hearts; as a result, they come to believe the message; they join the Christian community through baptism, and begin to share in its common life and its (p.116) common way of life.  That is how people come into relationship with the living God.—pp.116-17

…If you respond that the entire epistle to the Romans is a description of how persons become Christians, and that justification is central there, I will answer, anticipating my later argument, that this way of reading Romans has systematically done violence to that text for hundreds of years, and that it is time for the text itself to be heard again.  Paul does indeed discuss the subject-matter which the church has referred to as ‘justification, but he does not use ‘justification’ language for it… about how people come to a personal knowledge of God in Christ; but he does not use the language of ‘justification’ to denote this event or process.  Instead, he speaks of the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus, the work of the spirit, and the entry into the common life of the people of God.—p.117

First, it is covenant language—…in the first-century Jewish sense.  When Paul speaks of justification he is operating within the whole world of thought of second-temple Judaism, which clung onto the covenant promises in the face of increasingly difficult political circumstances.

Second, it is law-court language, … The covenant was there to put the world to rights, to deal with evil and to restore God’s justice and order to the cosmos….

Third, justification for Paul cannot be understood apart from eschatology….—p.117

Justification in Paul’s Jewish Context

I have already outlined the worldview and agenda of Saul of Tarsus.  He was, by his own admission, a zealous Pharisee, close in his views to the out-and-out revolutionaries.  As such, Saul was not interested in a timeless system of salvation, whether of works-righteousness or anything else.  He wanted God to redeem Israel.  Moreover, he drew freely on texts from the Hebrew Bible which promised that Israel’s God would do exactly that.  People like Saul were not primarily interested in the state of their souls after death; that was no doubt important, but no doubt God would have the matter in hand.  They were interested, urgently, in the salvation which, they believed, the one true God had promised to his people Israel.

            One feature of this hope needs to be emphasized at this point.  The purpose of the covenant was never simply that the creator wanted to have Israel as a special people, irrespective of the fate of the rest of the world.  The covenant was there to deal with the sin, and bring about the salvation, of the world.  It was therefore utterly appropriate, as I said earlier, that this great event should be described in terms drawn from the setting in which evil was regularly dealt with, namely that of the law court….—p.118

            This ‘justification’ would thus also be eschatological:….(p.118) Justification in this setting, then, is not a matter of how someone enters the community of the true people of God, but of how you tell who belongs to that community, not least in the period of time before the eschatological event itself, when the matter will become public knowledge.—pp.118-19

… ‘Justification’ in the first century was not about how someone might establish a relationship with God.  It was about God’s eschatological definition, both future and present, of who was, in fact, a member of his people…. In standard Christian theological language, it wasn’t so much about soteriology as about ecclesiology; not so much about salvation as about the church—p.119

…First, within the law-court setting, the ‘righteousness’ which someone has when the court has found in their favour is not a moral quality which they being into court with them; it is the legal status which they carry out of courts with them. Second, we saw that this legal status, the ‘righteousness’ of the person who has won the case, is not to be confused with the judge’s ‘righteousness’….—p.119

Justification in Paul’s Christian Theology

Galatians

Despite a long tradition to the contrary, the problem Paul addresses in Galatians is not the question of how precisely someone becomes a Christian, or attains to a relationship with God.  (I’m not even sure how Paul would express, in Greek, our notion of ‘relationship with God’, but we’ll leave that aside.)  The problem he address is: should his ex-pagan converts be circumcised or not?  Now this question is by no means obviously to do with the questions faced by Augustine and Pelagius, or by Luther and Erasmus.  On anyone’s reading, but especially within its first-century context, it has to do quite obviously with the question of how you define the people of God: are they to be defined by the badges of Jewish race, or in some other way?  Circumcision is not a ‘moral’ issue; it does not have to do with moral effort, or earning salvation by good deeds.  Nor can we simply treat it as a religious ritual, then designate all religious ritual as crypto-Pelagian good works, and (p.120) so smuggle Pelagius into Galatia as the arch-opponent after all.  First-century thought, both Jewish and Christian, simply doesn’t work like that –pp.120-21

…The question at issue in the church at Antioch, to which Paul refers in chapter 2, is not how people came to a relationship with God, but who one is allowed to eat with.  Who is a member of the people of God?   Are ex-pagan converts full members or not?  Within this question, which Paul clearly regards as a paradigm for the issue facing the Galatians themselves, certain things stand out.

            First, the context is irrevocably covenantal…. He is going back to the actual subject, which is not how individuals, Abraham then and the Galatians now, come to faith (as we say), but rather the question of who belongs to Abraham’s family.  This is clear in 3:29, where the conclusion of the argument is not ‘if you are Abraham’s family, you are in Christ’, but the  other way round.  God established the family of Abraham.  Paul reaffirms it.  What matters is who belongs to it.  Paul says that all those in Christ belong, whatever their racial background.—p.121

…in Galatians the two [ (in Sander’s language) ch. 1-4 ‘juridical’ & 5-8 as ‘participationist’] categories are happily jumbled up together, not least in the last paragraph of chapter 3.

The law was our overseer…. The promise.—p.121

            Paul does not regard this Torah as a bad thing.  He regards it as part of one vital stage in God’s secret plan.  That stage has now been put into operation, and has been completed.  The time has come for a new stage…. In Christ and by the Spirit the one God is now extending his salvation to all, irrespective of race…..—p.122

            What Paul means by justification, in this context, should therefore be clear.  It is not ‘how you become a Christian’, so much as ‘how you can tell who is a member of the covenant family’.  When two people share Christian faith, says Paul, they can share table-fellowship, no matter what their ancestry…. The  cross has obliterated the privileged distinction that Saul of Tarsus supposed himself to enjoy; the new life he has as Paul the apostle is a life defined, not by his old existence, but solely by the crucified and risen Messiah.

            The cross, in fact, throughout Galatians, is the redeeming turning-point of history.  It is the goal of Israel’s strange covenant story.  As a result, it is God’s way of healing his world.  Through the cross, ‘the world is crucified to me, and I to the world,’ so that now ‘neither circumcision nor uncircumcision matters; what matters is new creation’ (6:14-16).  This is covenant language.  Justification, in Galatians, is the doctrine which insists that all who share faith in Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their racial differences, as together they wait for the final new creation.—p.122

Philippians

…He is saying, in effect: I, though possessing covenant membership according to the flesh, did not regard that covenant membership as something to exploit; I emptied myself, sharing the death of the Messiah; wherefore God has given me the membership that really counts, in which I too will share the glory of Christ [3:2-11]

            How does this work out?  Paul first lists his racial covenant privileges, then outlines the features of his new position.  The central point in the latter exposition is undoubtedly Christ, not justification, as you will see by a quick count of references: half a dozen or more to Christ, one only to justification.

            The critical verse for our purposes is 3:9 (‘and be found in him … comes upon faith’).  It provides a clear statement of how ‘justification’ language actually works.

            First, it is membership language… That which he is refusing in the first half of verse 9 is not a moralistic or self-help righteousness, but the status of orthodox Jewish covenant membership.

            Second, the covenant status Paul now enjoys is the gift of God: it is a dikaiosune ek theou, a ‘righteousness from God’…. And this gift is bestowed (p.124) upon faith…. Faith is the badge of covenant membership, not something someone ‘performs’ as a kind of initiation test.  –pp.124-25

…Justification is not how someone becomes a Christian.  It is the declaration that they have become a Christian.  And the total context of this doctrine, here in Philippians 3, is that of the expectation—not of a final salvation in which the individual is abstracted from the present world, but of the final new heavens and new earth, as the Lord comes from the heavenly realm to transform the earthly (3:20-21).  Justification belongs within the total covenantal framework, with all its overtones of law court, participation and everything else.  It reminds the Philippians that their obligation is now to regard Christ as their contemporaries regarded Caesar: the Lord (kyrios) who will become the Saviour (soter)—and thus to receive their covenant membership in God’s people as a gift, a gift for which even Jewish racial covenant membership, let alone Roman citizenship, is at best an advance sign and at worst a damaging parody.—p.125

Romans

…from chapter 3… When Paul says ‘the gospel’, he does not mean (p.125) ‘justification by faith’; he means the message, the royal announcement, of Jesus Christ as Lord.  Romans 1:3-4, as we saw, gives a summary of the content of hs gospel; Romans 1:16-17 gives a summary of the effect, not the content, of the gospel

For I am not ashamed…. by faith’.

This does not, therefore, mean ‘the gospel reveals justification by faith as the true scheme of salvation, as opposed to Jewish elf-help moralsim’. When we unpack it fully, in the light of subsequent passages in the letter, it means: we unpack it fully, in the light of subsequent passages in the latter, it means:

The gospel—the announcement of the lordship of Jesus the Messiah—reveals God’s righteousness, his covenant faithfulness, his dealing with the sin of the world through the fulfillment of his covenant in this Lord Jesus Christ.  He has done all this righteously, that is, impartially.  He has dealt with sin, and rescued the helpless.  He has thereby fulfilled his promises.—pp.125-26

            It is strange, above all, that the first mention of justification in Romans is a mention of justification by works—apparently with Paul’s approval (2:13: ‘It is not the hearers of the law who will be righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified’).  The right way to understand this, I believe, is to see that Paul is talking about the final justification.  Eschatology, the hope of Israel, dominates the hrizon as ever.  The point is: who will be vindicated, resurrected, shown to be the covenant people, on the last day?  Paul’s answer, with which many non-Christian Jews would have agreed, is that those who will be vindicated on the last day are those in whose hearts and lives God will have written his (p.126) law, his Torah.  As Paul will make clear later on in the letter, this process cannot be done by the Torah alone; God has now done in Christ and by the Spirit what the Torah wanted to do but could not do.  So the question presses: who will these people be?

            In 2:17-24 Paul declares that it cannot be the Jews as defined by race….—pp.126-27

…But supposing, says Paul in 2:25-29—supposing there exist some true Jews, in whom the new covenant has been inaugurated?….Whether they are racially Jews or not, whether they are circumcised or not, they will be regarded by God as his true covenant people.  This is the doctrine of justification, or rather its first key move: there will come a time, a great day, on which God will vindicate his true people….

            …The Jewish longing for a great law-court scene, a great assize, in which they would be on one side and the Gentiles on the other. Seems to have gone horrible wrong.  But this prepares the way for Romans 3:21-31, in which God’s solution to the problem is disclosed.  God has now revealed his righteousness, his covenant faithfulness, through the faithfulness of the true Jew, the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth.—p.127

            Paul’s theology as a Christian began with this realization: that what he had expected God to do for Israel at the end of all things, God had done for Jesus in the middle of all things.  In and through Jesus Israel’s hope had been realized.  He had been raised from the dead, after suffering and dying at the hands of the pagans.  This fact lies at the heart of the crucial paragraph 3:21-31 (p.127)

…The passage [Romans 3:21-31] is all about the covenant, membership in which is now thrown open to Jew and Gentile alike; therefore it is all about God’s dealing with sin in the cross and resurrection of Jesus, because that was what the covenant was intended to do in the first place…. Once we fully grasp the nature of Pauline covenant theology, the fears that some have expressed, that a ‘covenantal’ reading of Paul will do away with a proper theology of sin and the cross, are shown to be groundless.  The purpose of the covenant, which was to deal with the sin of the world, has been accomplished in the cross of Jesus Christ the Lord. (p.128)

            ‘Where then is boasting? Asks Paul in 3:27.  ‘It is excluded!’  This ‘boasting’ which is excluded is not the boasting of the successful moralist; it is the racial boast of the Jew, as in 2:17-24.  If this is not so, 3:29 (‘Or is God the God of the Jews only?  Is he not of Gentiles also?’) is a non sequitur…. He is here, as in Galatians and Philippians, declaring that there is no road into covenant membership on the grounds of Jewish racial privilege.

            Within this context, ‘justification’, as seen in 3:24-26, means that those who believe in Jesus Christ are declared to be members of the true covenant family; which of course means that their sins are forgiven, since that was the purpose of the covenant.  They are given the status of being ‘righteous’ in the metaphorical law court.  When this is cashed out in terms of the underlying covenantal theme, it means that they are declared, in the present, to be what they will be seen to be in the future, namely the true people of God.  Present justification declares, on the basis of faith, what future justification will affirm publicly (according to 2:14-16 and 8:9-11) on the basis of the entire life.  And in making this declaration (3:26), God himself is in the right, in that he has been faithful to the covenant; he has dealt with sin, and upheld the helpless; and in the crucified Christ he has done so impartially.  The gospel—not ‘justification by faith’, but the message about Jesus—thus reveals the righteousness, that is, the covenant faithfulness of god.—pp.128-29

            What then about Romans 4… When Paul speaks of Abraham’s faith being ‘reckoned as righteousness’ (4:5), he means that faith in Jesus Christ—or, in Abraham’s case, faith that God would give him a worldwide family despite his extreme age—is the true badge of covenant membership.  Granted universal sinfulness, this means (once again) that faith of this sort is the badge of the sin-forgiven family.  The emphasis of the chapter is therefore that covenant membership is defined, not by circumcision (4:9-12), nor by race, but by faith.  That is why Abraham’s family can be, and in Christ already is, a multi-ethnic family.  Moreover, because of what is believed, the nature of faith itself is changed.  If you believe in a distant and powerless god, the sort of faith you have will be (p.129) dry and barren.  If you believe in the God who raises the dead, your faith will be lively and life-giving.  Abraham grew strong in faith (4:18-21) because he believed in this God, the God who raises the dead.  This faith was not something Abraham ‘did’ in order to earn the right to be within the people of God.  It was the badge which showed that he was a member—Indeed, the founding member—of that people

            On this basis, Paul argues in Romans 5-8 that all who believe this gospel are the true, sin-forgiven, people of God, who are thus assured of their future salvation, which will consist in their resurrection as one aspect of the renewal of all of God’s world.  In 5:12-21 Paul stands back from the picture he has sketched and says, in effect: there you are—God’s purpose in the covenant was to deal with the sin of Adam.  Now, in Christ Jesus, that is exactly what he has done.  The Torah could only offer slavery, since it accentuated the Jews’ problem, namely, that they were ‘in Adam’.  The chosen people were as human, and fallen, as everyone else.  But now (8:1-4) God has done what the Torah really wanted to do.  He has given life to the world, life which will finally have the effect of liberating the entire cosmos, not just humans, from the effects of sin and death (8:18-27).  It is this outworking of the gospel, and of justification, that is then celebrated in 8:31-39, where Paul returns to the eschatological, final justification which will consist in the resurrection of all Christ’s people, their vindication after their suffering in the present time.

            …The passage from Romans 9:30-10:21 sets out the results of what God has done in Israel’s history.  God has called Israel to be the means of salvation for the world.  His intention always was to narrow this vocation down to the Messiah, so that in his death all, Jew and Gentile alike, would find salvation.  If, however, Israel insists on keeping her status for herself, she will find she is clinging to her own death-warrant.

            …while Gentiles are discovering covenant membership, characterized by faith, Israel, clinging to the Torah which defined covenant membership, did not attain to the Torah…. For Christ is the end or goal of the law, so that all who believe may receive covenant (p.130) membership…. Which was always to deal with sin and so to set in motion the renewal of the whole cosmos.  Now that purpose is fulfilled, what remains is mission (10:9ff).  So the letter to the Romans goes on its way: not as a detached statement of how people get saved, how they enter a relationship with God as individuals, but as an exposition of the covenant purposes of the creator God.  The letter emphasizes above all the mission and unity of the church, as things most necessary for the Romans to grasp if they are to be the base for the further westward expansion of Paul’s mission.—pp.130-31

Conclusion

Let me sum up Paul’s doctrine of justification. …We had better take this carefully, step by step, according to the three key categories I mentioned earlier, namely, the covenant, the law court and eschatology.

1. Covenant.  Justification is the covenant declaration, which will be issued on the last day, in which the true people of God will be vindicated and those who insist on worshipping false gods will be shown to be in the wrong.

2. Law court.  Justification functions like the verdict in the law court: by acquitting someone, it confers on that person the status ‘righteous’.  This is the forensic dimension of the future covenantal vindication.

3.  Eschatology.  This declaration, this verdict, is ultimately to be made at the end of history.  Through Jesus, however, God has done in the middle of history what he had been expected to do—and, indeed, will still do—at the end; so that the declaration, the verdict, can be issued already in the present, in anticipation.  The events of the last day were anticipated when Jesus died on the cross, as the representative Messiah of Israel, and rose again.  (This was Paul’s own theological starting-point).  The verdict of the last day is therefore  now also anticipated in the present, whenever someone believes in the gospel message about Jesus.

4 Therefore—and this is the vital thrust of the argument of Galatians in particular, but it plays a central role in Philippians and Romans as well—all who believe the gospel of Jesus Christ are already demarcated as members of the true family of Abraham, with their sins being forgiven.—p.131

            Paul, as usual, retains the shape of the Jewish doctrine, while filling it with new content.  For him, covenant membership was defined by the gospel itself, that is, by Jesus Christ.  The badge of membership, the thing because of which one can tell in the present who is within the eschatological covenant people, was of course faith, the confession that Jesus is Lord and the belief that God raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9),  ‘Faith’, for Paul, is therefore not a substitute ‘work’ in a moralistic sense.  It is not something one does in order to gain admittance into the covenant people.  It is the badge that proclaims that one is already a member.  Likewise, ‘faith’ for Paul is not a general religious awareness, or a general romantic opposition to moralism and preference for a religion of inward feeling.  It is very precise and specific.  It is faith in the gospel message, the announcement of the true God as defined in and through Jesus Christ.—p.132

…I must stress again that the doctrine of justification by faith is not what Paul means by ‘the gospel’.  It is implied by the gospel; when the gospel is proclaimed, people come to faith and so are regarded by God as members (p.132) of his people.  But ‘the gospel’ is not an account of how people get saved.  It is, as we saw in an earlier chapter, the proclamation of the lordship of Jesus Christ….—pp.132-3

Chapter 8 God’s Renewed Humanity

…The zeal of Saul of Tarsus was thus transformed into the zeal of Paul the apostle; and, because this specific transformation involved the recognition, at its very heart, that the God of Israel was now revealed in and as the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, Paul’s ‘zeal’ itself radically changed in character.  No longer was it violent, aimed at winning God’s battles by brute force.  It lost none of its energy; but that energy was now characterized by the thing that Paul saw at the very heart of the God he learnt to worship afresh: the quality which he called agape—love.—p.135

… On the one hand, he believed that humanity renewed in Christ was the genuine article, explicitly contrasted with the fractured and downgraded humanity which characterized paganism.  On the other hand, he believed that humanity renewed in Christ was the fulfillment of the vocation of Israel, which unbelieving Israel was failing to attain.  Paul was now zealous to promote this genuine humanity as the God-given answer to paganism, and to urge Jews who were missing out on it that this was in fact the true fulfillment of their history and tradition.

            …he zealously articulated, modeled, inculcated, and urged upon his converts a way of life which he saw as being the genuinely human way of life.  And he saw this as the way of life to which Judaism had been called, but to which, without the Messiah, Judaism had not attained and could not attain….—p.136

The Centre of Renewed Humanity: Worship

Pagan, Adamic humanity looked at God’s power and deity and instead worshipped elements of the world.  Abraham looked at the deadly reality of the world—specifically, his own and Sarah’s bodies, as good as dead because of age—and refused to let his horizon be determined by that.  Instead, he gave God the glory and trusted him to fulfil his promises.  We are rightly told by the commentators that Abraham’s faith is the subject of Romans 4; but it is not so often noticed that the centre of that faith is the worship of the one true God….—p.139

The Goal of Renewed Humanity: Resurrection

…The hope of resurrection—not, as he says, to be unclothed, but to be more fully clothed—is the reality of the future life; paganism offers mere parodies of it.  Resurrection is not simply resuscitation; it is transformation, the changing of the present mode of physicality into a new mode, of which Jesus in his risen body is the only prototype, but for which the transformation of a seed into a plant can function as a general analogy.  This is the creator’s plan for the future of his human creatures.

            In his doctrine of resurrection, Paul avoids two opposite dangers: the divinization of the created order and the dualistic rejection of the created order.  Stoicism, being basically pantheist, saw the material world as basically divine.  But in that case, there could never be any real change in the world; (p.140) history would go on repeating itself, dissolving into fire at the end of the present age and then starting up all over again with the identical events happening all over again.  Paul’s doctrine of resurrection, standing firmly on the Jewish view of God, the world and history, offered a positive evaluation of the created order….—pp.140-41

What is more, because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Paul sees that the Christian answer to the question ‘What time is it? Is radically different from the Jewish answer.  As a Pharisee he would have answered: we are living in the last days before the great act of God within history to defeat the pagans and liberate Israel.  As a Christian he answered: we are living in the first days after the great act of God within history to defeat sin and death and liberate the whole cosmos.  He would then have added: these are also the last days before the great act of God which will bring to completion that which was begun in Christ….—p.141

…It is often assumed that Paul’s horizon was dominated by the expectation that the space-time universe was (p.141) about to come to an end.  The apocalyptic passage in 1 Thessalonians, and the warning about the present time being ‘constrained’ in I Corinthians 7:29-31, have been pressed into service to suggest that Paul believed something which, as I have argued in detail elsewhere, neither first-century Jews at large nor Jesus and the earliest Christian in particular believed.  The twentieth-century world of New Testament scholarship, not least those parts that have inveighed against ‘literalism’ of the fundamentalist sort, has all too often insisted on a literal reading of that regular Jewish language—the sun and the moon being darkened, and so forth—which, from its biblical context, we ought to know was intended, and understood, as powerful metaphor.

Paul expected great, cataclysmic events; there is no doubt of that.  He was urgent about his work, knowing there were things to be done before those events happened.  He also believed that at some stage in the future the God who had made the entire cosmos would ‘set it free from its bondage to decay’ (Romans 8:21).  At the end, God would be ‘all in all’, having subjugated all rival powers (I Corinthians 15:23-28).  But we should not too quickly confuse this larger horizon of expectation with the immediate crisis that Paul knows is about to break upon the world.  Jews of his day, as of other days, were used to ‘seeing’ space-time, political events in terms of ‘the Day of the Lord’.  Otherwise, why would he tell the Thessalonians not to worry if they received a letter, supposedly from him, saying that the Day of the Lord had already arrived (2 Thessalonians 2:2)?  If ‘the Day of the Lord’ meant the end of the space-time universe, one might suppose that the Thessalonians would not need to be informed of this event by mail.  We have for too long allowed ourselves to be boxed in, in our reading of Paul, by the end-of-the-world agenda.  It is time to see Paul as he understood himself: as someone living already in the beginning of God’s new age, the age which began on Easter morning.—pp.141-42

The Transformation of Renewed Humanity: Holiness

            Holiness is a complex and difficult topic.  I simply want to stress, under this heading, that Paul sees holiness not as an optional extra, not as something to which some Christians are called while others are allowed to stay in a state of semi-paganism, but as something which necessarily characterizes all those who are renewed in Christ.  At the same time, he is al realist. He does not suppose, as some commentators have assumed he supposes, that Christians are able, in virtue of their baptism, the indwelling of the Spirit, or whatever, to live a hundred-per-cent holy life all the time….—p.143

…[Romans 7] …here Paul uses the autobiographical device, the ‘I’, not least to avoid giving the appearance of criticizing his fellow-Jews as though from a distance.  The plight he describes is that which, from his Christian standpoint, he realizes he had been in as a zealous Pharisee.  Israel, he suggests, is right to embrace Torah, because it is indeed holy, and just, and good.  It does indeed point to the goal of true humanity.  But because Israel is still in Adam, the holy just and good law must condemn her.  It can do no other.  ‘That which promised life proved to be death to me.’  Only when the basic condition of Israel’s Adamic humanness has been dealt with in Christ—which happens, for Paul, in the death and resurrection of Jesus, and in the Christian identification with those events in baptism—can ‘the law of the Spirit of life set you free from the law of sin and death’ (Romans 8:2)

            In Galatians 5, Paul faces the fact that the Galatians are eager to embrace Torah, not least because they want to move as far away from their old pagan lifestyle as they possibly can.  They have seen their former pagan idolatry and immorality for what they are, and are determined to go instead for the way of true humanity, of holiness and worship.  The ‘agitators’ (those who infiltrated the Galatian community after Paul had left) have told them that they can achieve this end by embracing Torah.  Not so, says Paul: if you do that you will simply be emphasizing that which binds you to the old humanity, to the flesh.  The fact that the sign of embracing Torah is circumcision makes this point even more sharply.  If you take on Torah, you won’t be raising yourself to a height above that of your former pagan life, above even that of your new Christian (but not Torah-observant) life; you will be reducing yourself once more to the level of paganism, emphasizing the flesh, that which binds you to the old humanity.  As a result, you will again be in the self-destructive mode of human existence.  If you want the genuine article, you must walk by the Spirit, whose fruit is love, joy and peace.—p.144

            Throughout Paul’s writings, genuine holiness is seen in terms of dying and rising with Christ….—p.145

            The death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah are not, for Paul, merely events in the past, however climatic.  They are the foundation of his, and the church’s, daily existence.  ‘Sharing the sufferings of Christ, in order to share his glory also’; that is the keynote of what Paul means by holiness.  Genuine humanness does not come cheap.—p.145

The Coherence of Renewed Humanity: Love

            A brief word about love.  Paul does not mean that all Christians should feel warm fuzzy feelings for each other.  That romantic and existentialist reading of agape does not begin to capture what is really going on.  The critical thing is that the church, those who worship God in Christ Jesus, should function as a family in which every member is accepted as an equal member, no matter what their social, cultural or moral background.  The very existence of such a community demonstrates to the principalities and powers, the hidden but powerful forces of prejudice and suspicion, that their time is up, that the living God has indeed won the victory over them, that there is now launched upon the world a different way of being human, a way in which the traditional distinctions between human beings are done away with.  That is why we find in Ephesians the climatic statement: the purpose of the gospel is that ‘through the church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places (Eph. 3:10).  The very existence of a community of love, love where before there was mutual suspicion and distrust, is the crucial piece of evidence that tells Paul that God’s spirit has been at work (Col. 1:8)

            Clearly, the existence and flourishing of such a community is the thing that is going to reveal to the pagan world that the gospel of Jesus Christ is what it claims to be.  That is why, when writing I Corinthians, Paul builds up his argument step by step, showing at point after point the way in which this community is radically different from its pagan neighbours, until at last he reaches chapter 13…. (p.146)

Everything Paul has said so far on every topic has been, after all, an appeal for agape.  This is the lifestyle that reveals what genuine renewed humanity is all about.  Paganism is always trying to ape it, but all it can do is collapse into personality cults, factional fighting (it’s very easy, after all, to ‘love’ everyone else in your faction; that’s the point of having a faction in the first place), and blatant eroticism, which parodies the life of agape at the same time as it progressively distorts, defaces, and destroys the human beings who live in that way.—p.147

…Notoriously and obviously, his appeal for the Jew-plus-Gentile united family in Christ cuts against all attempts to make Christianity a sub-branch of Judaism…. He sees all too clearly that if the church splits into Jewish and Gentile Christian factions, perhaps with some Gentile Christians joining the Jewish Christians by undergoing circumcision, this will mean that the principalities and powers are still after all ruling the world; that they have not after all been defeated by Christ on the cross; that there is no such thing as a renewed humanity, and that he has all along been whistling in the dark in pretending that there is.—p.147

The Zeal of Renewed Humanity: Mission

            The doctrine of the image of God in his human creatures was never the belief simply that humans were meant to reflect God back to God.  They were meant to reflect God out into the world….—p.148

            Of course, Jesus is a different sort of king to Caesar.  That is part of the point.  Paul is not simply setting up a new empire of the same variety, another oppressive human regime.  But it will not do to suppose that the differences between Christ and Caesar, for Paul, are that the one is ‘spiritual’ and the other ‘temporal’, so that they become locked in two separate compartments with no relation between them.  The whole point of ‘confessing Jesus Christ as Lord’ is that at his name every knee shall bow.  Caesar has a role (Romans 13), but a strictly limited one.  He is to be obeyed because his office and authority are derived from the creator, who intends his human creatures to live in order, safety and stability, rather than in chaos or anarchy.  As soon as Caesar acts as though he were a god—as of course in Paul’s day most Caesars did—Paul would be the first to call a spade a spade.  If the early Christian community saw the death of Herod Agrippa as divine judgment on a monarch who gave himself divine honours (Acts 12:20-23), there  is no doubt what Paul would have said about pagan worship of the Roman emperor.  There was only one God; this God had exalted his Son, Jesus, as the true Lord of the world; his empire was the reality, Caesar’s the parody.

            Paul’s mission should not be thought of, then, merely in terms of individualistic evangelism, rescuing souls one by one for a future heaven….—p.149

Chapter 9 Paul’s Gospel Then and Now

            For Paul, ‘the gospel’ creates the church; ‘justification’ defines it.  The gospel announcement carries its own power to save people, and to dethrone the idols to which they had been bound.  ‘The gospel’ itself is neither a system of thought, nor a set of techniques for making people Christians; it is the personal announcement of the person of Jesus.  That is why it creates the church, the people who believe that Jesus is Lord and that God raised him from the dead.  ‘Justification’ is then the doctrine which declares that whoever believes that gospel, and wherever and whenever they believe it, those people are truly members of his family, no matter where they came from, what colour their skin may be, whatever else might distinguish them from each other.  The gospel itself creates the church; justification continually reminds the church that it is the people created by the gospel and the gospel alone, and that it must live on that basis.—p.151

On Thinking Paul’s Thoughts

To begin with, I want to point out the way in which the sketch I have offered makes sense of what otherwise appear as puzzling antinomies or even contradictions at the heart of Paul’s thought.  I wrote in the first chapter (p.151) about the line of thought from Schweitzer to Sanders, which plays off ‘law-court’ terminology against what Schweitzer calls ‘mystical’ and Sanders calls ‘participationist’ categories.  Once we grasp the covenantal nature of Paul’s thought, and the way in which the covenant always carried the sense of God’s great law court at its heart, this antinomy is revealed for what it is: a projection back onto Paul of a distinction which owes its origin to a much later philosophy and theology, and has little or nothing to do with the real Paul.  For him, ‘being in Christ’—the fundamental ‘participationist’ idea—means ‘belonging to the people of God as redefined around the Messiah’.  It is, in other words, a specifically covenantal way of speaking.  Equally, however, the language of ‘righteousness’—of God’s own covenant faithfulness on the one hand, and of the status of covenant membership which God’s people are given on the other, and the way in which both of these are seen through the metaphorical lens of the law court—is covenantal through and through.  This is, I dare asy, of enormous importance for those who, as part of their own preaching of Paul today, struggle with commentaries and books on Paul in which these categories are wrongly played off against one another.—p.152

…In reaction against some versions of a ‘covenantal’ reading of Paul, some scholars (such as J.L. Martyn) have emphasized the ‘apocalyptic’ nature of his thought.  Covenantal categories, it is thought , imply a steady development from Abraham to Christ and beyond, with great continuity between Old and New Testament, between promise and fulfillment.  What we find in Paul, however, is rather the (supposedly) ‘apocalyptic’ notion of a clean break, the rude shock of the crucifixion cutting across all previous expectation.  2 Corinthians 5:16 might function as a slogan for this: ‘The old has passed away; behold, all things have become new’.—p.152

…When we understand how Paul’s covenantal categories work out, we see that they have the cross and resurrection at their heart.  The one saving (covenantal) plan always was, so to speak, cruciform.  The covenant was set up to deal with evil and death; it was never a matter of creating a smoothly progressing salvation-history and inviting people to get on board.—p.152

Announcing the King

Proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord

…There was a popular slogan some years ago, according to which ‘if Jesus is not Lord of all, he is not Lord at all’.  That was routinely applied to personal piety and commitment.  I suggest that it is just as true, and just as important, in terms of the cosmic lordship of Jesus.

            This means, of course, as it meant for Paul, that there is no area of existence or life, including no area of human life, that does not come up for critique in the light of the sovereignty of the crucified and risen Jesus; no area that is exempt from the summons to allegiance.  Perhaps one reason why some have shied away from seeing Jesus’ messiahship as a central part of Paul’s gospel has been the tacit recognition that it is much easier to turn Christianity into what the Enlightenment wanted it to be—a private system of piety which doesn’t impinge on the public world—if the kingship of Jesus is regarded as an unfortunate, and overly Jewish, way of thinking, which Paul and the rest of the early church quickly and thankfully grew out of… I want to pose the question: what would preachers of the gospel need to do today if people were to say of them what they said of Paul, that he was announcing, in the face of the claims of Caesar, that there was ‘another king, namely Jesus’?

            They would need, for a start, to do what Paul did, namely, to confront the powers of the world with the news that their time is up, and that they owe allegiance to Jesus himself. This is not so much a matter of telling individual politicians and power-brokers that they need to acknowledge Jesus as the Lord of their own lives, though of course that is important as well.  It is more a matter of telling them, in the name of Jesus, that there is a different way of being human, a way characterized by self-giving love, by justice, by honesty, and by the breaking down of the traditional barriers that reinforce the divisions which keep human beings separate from, and as often as not at odds with, one another.  And, of course, it is no good saying all this if the church is not saying it by its very life.  As I shall suggest presently, this message is at its most powerful when it is presented in symbol and praxis, (p.154) not merely in dogma and story.  This is not a matter, as is sometimes said, of ‘bringing politics into religion’.  It is bringing the whole world under the lordship of Christ.  The gospel message leaves us no choice.—pp.154-55

            First, if Jesus is the Lord of all the world, the great god Mammon is not … We live in a society where debt, which used to be regarded as somewhat sordid and shameful, is glitzy and glamorous … At the global level, the problem if debt is notorious and acute, creating misery for millions while it generates millions for a tiny minority.  Several church leaders are currently giving their backing and blessing to the project of declaring a year of Jubilee at the Millennium, a year in which major debts would be revoked and everyone could start again.  There are of course huge problems with such a scheme, but since the biggest of them is the self-interest of those in positions of power, I fail to see why the churches as a whole could not, as a matter of preaching the gospel of the crucified and risen Jesus, join together in naming the idol Mammon for what he is, and celebrating the love of God in Christ in his place.—p.155

…We live in a world where still, despite twenty centuries of Christian history, almost everybody assumes that power means, more or less, force majeur.  Western democracy has for two centuries at least offered what seemed like a stable place between the frightening alternatives of totalitarianism and anarchy.  Whether it will continue to do so many depend, I suggest, on the ability of the churches to proclaim that if Jesus is truly the Lord of the world then there is a different sort of power, a more powerful sort of power, a power that is made perfect in weakness.—p.156

…The gospel creates allegiance, not ‘experience’ per se.  When we are truly announcing the lordship of Jesus, we must make it clear that, according to this gospel, the one true God has dealt in Jesus Christ with sin, death, guilt and shame, and now summons men and women everywhere to abandon the idols which hold them captive to these things and to discover a new life, and a new way of life, in him.  But the gospel is not simply the offer of a new way of being religious.  It is not the offer of a certain type of self-fulfilment, or a certain style of religious experience.  It is not a take-it-or-leave-it thing, which suggests that people could try this thing on for size and only buy it if the mood takes them.  The gospel is the royal announcement.  No herald in the ancient world would say ‘Tiberius Caesar has become emperor: accept him if it suits you!’  … The gospel is, then, the announcement about Jesus, not in itself the offer of a new experience.  Whatever new experiences result from giving one’s allegiance to Jesus are just that, a bunch of new experiences.  The only experience guaranteed by Jesus’ summons is that of carrying the cross.—p.157

Justification Then and Now

Justification and community

The gospel creates, not a bunch of individual Christians, but a community…..—p.157

…Of course every single human being is summoned, in his or her uniqueness, to respond personally to the gospel.  Nobody in their right mind would deny that.  But there is no such thing as an ‘individual’ Christian.  Paul’s gospel created a community; his doctrine of justification sustained it.  Ours must do no less.—p.158

The ecumenical task

…The doctrine of justification, in other words, is not merely a doctrine which Catholic and Protestant might just be able to agree on, as a result of hard ecumenical endeavour.  It is itself the ecumenical doctrine, the doctrine that rebukes all our petty and often culture-bound church groupings, and which declares that all who believe in Jesus belong together in the one family.  Of course there will still be difficulties.  Of course we must still have doctrinal debates.  But until Christians grasp the message of Galatians 2 (not to mention Romans 14-15, Ephesians 1-3, and sundry other passages), they will still be at first base as far as a true earthing of Paul’s theology is concerned.  The doctrine of justification is in fact the great ecumenical doctrine.—p.158

…Justification declares that all who believe in Jesus Christ belong at the same table, no matter what their cultural or racial differences (and, let’s face it, a good many denominational distinctions, and indeed distinctions within a single denomination, boil down more to culture than to doctrine).  Because what matters is believing in Jesus, detailed agreement on justification itself, properly conceived, isn’t the thing which should determine Eucharistic fellowship.  If Christians could only get this right, they would find that not only would they be believing the gospel, they would be practicing it; and that is the best basis for proclaiming it.—p. 159

Justified without knowing it

There follows from this a vital and liberating point, which I first met in the works of the great Anglican divine Richard Hooker, and for which I shall always be grateful.  One is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith.  One is justified by faith believing in Jesus.  It follows quite clearly that a great many people are justified by faith who don’t know they are justified by faith.  The Galatian Christians were in fact justified by faith, though they didn’t realize it and thought they had to be circumcised as well.  As Hooker said, many pre-Reformation folk were in fact justified by faith, because they believed in Jesus, even though, not knowing about or believing in justification by faith, they lacked assurance, and then sought to fill this vacuum in other ways.  Many Christians today may not be very clear about the niceties of doctrine; but, however inarticulately, they hold on to Jesus; and, according to Paul’s teaching, they are therefore justified by faith.  They are constituted as members of the family.  They must be treated as such.  This is not to say, of course, that justification is an unimportant or inessential doctrine.  Far from it.  A church that does not grasp it and teach it is heading for trouble.  It is to say that the doctrine of justification itself points away from itself.  Believing in Jesus—believing that Jesus is Lord, and the God raised him from the dead—is what counts.—p.159

Justification and holiness

…Allegiance to this Jesus must be total.  One of Paul’s key phrases is ‘the obedience of faith’.  Faith and obedience are not antithetical.  They belong exactly together.  Indeed, very often the word ‘faith’ itself could properly be translated as ‘faithfulness’, which makes the point just as well.  Nor, of course, does this then compromise the gospel or justification, smuggling in ‘works’ by a back door.  That would only be the case if their realignment I have been arguing for throughout were not grasped.  Faith, even in this active sense, is never and in no way a qualification, provided from the human side, either for getting into God’s family or for staying there once in.  It is the God-given badge of membership, neither more nor less.  Holiness is the appropriate human condition for those who, by grace alone, find themselves as believing members of the family of God.—p.160

Justification and the powers

…The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith strikes against all attempts to demarcate membership in the people of God by anything other than faith in Jesus Christ; particularly, of course, it rules out any claim to status before God based on race, class or gender.  Any attempt to define church membership by anything other than allegiance to Jesus Christ is, quite simply, idolatrous.  This was the battle Paul had to fight in Antioch and Galatia, and several other places as well.  Here, the thrust of justification is well summed up in Ephesians 3:10, not in terms of what the church must say but in terms of what it must do and be:….—p.160

The Redefinition of God and His Righteousness

…Theology, like nature, abhors a vacuum.  Deism, historically, produces atheism; first you make God a landlord, then he becomes an absentee landlord, then he becomes simply an absentee.  But this situation isn’t stable; and, pretty son, you find others, older divinities coming up to take his place.  This is, of course, very evident in the New Age movements, some of which are explicitly neo-pagan.  Just as Jewish monotheism stood over against dualism, paganism, Epicureanism and Stoicism, so the Christian version of Jewish monotheism must stand, as it did in Paul’s preaching, over against all alternative theologies.—p.162

…The New Age offers a sudden and exciting reversal of this: creation, including oneself, is divine.  Paul’s gospel offers the reality of which this is the parody.  Creation is not God, but God has made it to reflect his own beauty and, ultimately, to share the freedom of the glory of his children.  Human beings are not divine, but they are designed to reflect his own image, and to be filled with his own Spirit.—p.162

            Addressing these questions is not, of course, a mere matter of getting answers right.  Theologies, at this point, determine the way people live, the way they organize the world, the way they treat one another.  It could only be within a predominantly Deist culture that the word ‘theology’ could become, as it has in some quarters of public life, a sneering word for irrelevant theory.  If we are claiming, with the Pauline gospel, the high ground of speaking for the one true God, made known in Jesus and the Spirit, then we must be prepared to show how the language of theology relates intimately and vitally to the whole of life, culture, love, art, politics and even religion.  This could even mean challenging the academic world in a new way by showing how the study of theology is vitally linked to all other disciplines….—p.163

…the covenant between God and Israel was always designed to be God’s means of saving the whole world.  It was never supposed to be the means whereby God would have a private little group of people who would be saved while the rest of the world went to hell (whatever you might mean by that).  Thus, when God is faithful to the covenant in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and in the work of the Spirit, it makes nonsense of the Pauline gospel to imagine that the be-all and end-all of this operation is so that God can have another, merely different, private little group of people who are saved while the world is consigned to the cosmic waste-paper basket.  It is not insignificant that the critical passages at this point, the middle of Romans 8 and the middle of 1 Corinthians 15, have themselves often been consigned to a kind of exegetical and theological limbo, with Protestant exegesis in particular appearing quite unsure what to do with them.—p.163

…If it is true that God intends to renew the whole cosmos through Christ and by the Spirit—and if that isn’t true then Paul is indeed talking nonsense in Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15….—p.164

…If the gospel reveals the righteousness of God, and if the church is commanded and authorized to announce that gospel, it cannot rest content—for exegetical as well as theological reasons—with anything less than this complete vision.  And it cannot therefore rest content while injustice, oppression and violence stalk God’s world.  After all, Christians are commanded to bring one small piece of creation—their own bodies—into obedience to the healing love of God in Christ.  Christians are to live in the present in the light of what God intends us to be in the future.  That, as we saw, is what holiness is all about it.  How can we then not apply the same point to the whole of creation?—p.164

Conclusion

…I believe, in other words, that Paul’s gospel, and the doctrine of justification which follows closely and inescapably from it, have the power to do for the world and the church of today what they did in Paul’s own day.

            Of course, that will demand persons willing to take the risk of copying Paul: of being wise fools, strong weaklings, failures in human terms.  If Christians are to preach the gospel, they cannot expect to be exempt from living the gospel.  That, indeed, is part of the message we need to rediscover: that gospel truth is not a matter of ideas only, but of symbol, story and praxis.  As Paul himself put it, the kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.  So, having attempted to say again what St Paul really said, it is important to remind ourselves that this sort of exercise is only a pointer to the real thing.  The gospel of God, today and tomorrow as in Paul’s day, is not something to analyze, understand, put in our intellectual pockets and go home content.  It is something which, if its very truth is not to be fatally compromised, must become, as it did in Jesus, flesh and blood.   That which was unveiled before an unprepared world in Jesus Christ must be unveiled again and again, as those who believe in Jesus Christ live by the spirit and, in life as well as in word, announce the gospel to the world.—p.165

Chapter 10 Paul, Jesus and Christian Origins

…A.N. Wilson, a prolific writer of novels and biographies, has recently produced a book entitled Paul: The Mind of the Apostle… [in which he says] ‘The sayings of Jesus can shock us but they scarcely represent a cohesive oral framework on which we can base our lives.  The religion of Paul, by contrast, wild, ecstatic and confused as it must often appear… contains all the makings of a religion with universal appeal’ (239).  This, it seems, was the beginning of what we know as Christianity. For the Gentile followers of Paul, ‘the word Christ was synonymous not with the Anointed Jewish Deliverer of Israel, so much as with an inner known God, a hidden Saviour, a Blessed Sacrament called Jesus’ (132).  In all this, Wilson manages nevertheless to salvage some continuity with Jesus, but at a high level of abstraction.  ‘While the Petrines, the Palestinians, clung to the memory of Jesus, Paul was able to apply, as a universalized creed, the perceptions of heaven which were perhaps Jesus’ own: the confidence that each individual could turn to God as to a Father and meet a response of love’ (239)

            Where, then, did Paul get this new religion from?  Wilson never glimpses Saul the Shammaite Pharisee, as we have expounded his pre-Christian life in chapter 2 above.  Instead he invents an interesting new character.  He envisages a Saul who grew up in the midst of pagan religion in Tarsus, knowing particularly the Mithraic rituals and the worship of the divine Herakles.  He then, going to Jerusalem, entered the employ of the chief priests, and acted as a temple servant.  In that capacity, he undoubtedly saw and heard Jesus himself, and undoubtedly knew about, perhaps even witnessed, his crucifixion.  He may even have helped to arrest Jesus.  He was a collaborator with Rome.—p.168

…The Mithras-cult was the basis of Paul’s invention of the Christian eucharist, which Wilson manages both to disparage as a mere innovation, unrelated to the Jesus of history, and to admire as a remarkably influential cultural phenomenon (165-68).  Similarly, Paul borrowed the idea of the demi-god Herakles as the model for his picture of the dying and rising Jesus (71,258)—p.169

…It is easier by far, historically, exegetically and theologically, to suppose that Paul the Jew reflected Jewishly, in the light of the Jewish scriptures on the one hand and the resurrection of Jesus on the other, on the claim that Jesus was indeed the Jewish Messiah, in whom the promises had been fulfilled.  Easier by far to recognize that he came quickly to see that the claim was not only true, but relevant as it stood to the whole world, not least the pagan world where the essentially Jewish message of the deep and passionate love of the creator God for his whole creation was neither known nor imagined.—p.175

For Paul, the cross and resurrection were the eschatological events par excellence.  He know that God would, one day, complete the work he had begun both in the cosmos (Romans 8; I Corinthians 15), and in him personally, as in all believers (Philippians 1:6).  He knew, too, that events were looming on the historical scene which would be, along with the resurrection of Jesus, part of the eschatological in breaking of the Age to Come (2 Thessalonians 2).  But he knew, above all and more than all, that the Age to Come had already dawned when Jesus of Nazareth defeated death.  That was what mattered.  The out workings and implications demanded energy and application, and even suffering and facing persecution.  But all was done with a note of joy: nothing could now separate those in Christ from the all-powerful-, all-conquering love of the creator and covenant God.—p.175

…It was precisely when Paul was standing firm against paganism—against pagan cult in I Corinthians 8, against pagan empire in Philippians 2, and against pagan principalities and powers in Colossians 1—that he places Jesus within statements of Jewish monotheism.  This cannot be accidental. Paul cannot have failed to have known what he was doing at this point.  All right, it was risky.  He must have known that some of his hearers would misunderstand, would think (as they did in Athens) that he was peddling news of one or two foreign deities (‘Jesus and Anastasis’ (Acts 17:18): anastasis was, of course, the Greek for ‘resurrection, and the passage holds out the intriguing possibility that some Athenians thought Paul was talking about two divine beings, one male and one female).  Paul would have claimed that he had to take the risk.  The fact of Jesus’ resurrection, understood in the light not of nebulous mystical experience but of the Jewish scriptures themselves, left him with no choice.  Jesus the Jewish Messiah was the reality of which all pagan idols were the parody.  Jesus the Jewish Messiah, in whom the God of Israel had become known personally, fact to face—this Jesus was the reality towards which all Israel’s history, tradition, prophecy, suffering and expectation had been pointing.—p.176

            If we are to locate both Jesus and Paul within the world of first-century Judaism, within the turbulent theological and political movements and expectations of the time (and if we are not then we should admit that we know very little about either of them) then we must face the fact that neither of them was teaching a timeless system of religion or ethics, or even (p.178) a timeless message about how human beings are saved.  Both of them believed themselves to be actors within the drama staged by Israel’s God in fulfillment of his long purposes.  Both, in other words, breathed the air of Jewish eschatology.

            It will not do, therefore, to line up ‘Jesus’ key concepts’ and ‘Paul’s key concepts’; and play them off against one another.  It will not do to point out that Jesus talked about repentance and the coming kingdom, while Paul talked about justification by faith.  It misses the point even to show (though this can be done quite easily) that these two, when set in context and translated into terms of one another, belong extremely closely together.  The point is that Jesus believed himself to be called to a particular role in the eschatological drama; and so did Paul.  The real question is, what were those roles, and how might they relate?

            I have argued elsewhere that Jesus believed himself called to be the one through whom God’s strange purposes for Israel would reach their ordained climax…. But the kingdom would not look like Jesus’ contemporaries had imagined.  It would not endorse their particular agendas.  Particularly, it would not underwrite the agendas of those who were bent on ‘zeal’, on forcing upon Israel a hard and exclusive piety, an all-or-nothing stand for God, Torah, Land and Temple that would commit Israel to a war of liberation against Rome.  Jesus warned that to take this route would result in huge, unmitigated disaster; and that this disaster, if Israel brought it down upon her own head, would have to be seen as the wrath of Israel’s God against his people.  Such actions would mean that the perpetrators had translated their vocation to be the light of the world into a vocation to be the judges of the world.  Those who judged would themselves be judged.  Those who took the sword would perish with the sword.  Those who turned the Temple into a den of brigands would only have themselves to blame when the Temple itself was torn down, so that not one stone was left upon another.

            But Jesus did not remain as a spectator, commenting on this passage of events from outside.  He came to the centre of the stage, not just metaphorically, but literally, in his entry to Jerusalem and his Temple-action.  His dramatic action symbolized his belief that he was called to be the Messiah, the one through whom Israel’s destiny would be realized.  We need, perhaps, to remind ourselves that within a hundred years or so of (p.179) Jesus there were at least a dozen others who believed themselves to be the Messiah.)  He had authority over the Temple.  The house of God might be destroyed, but he would be vindicated. Yet, as he clearly knew, by his symbolic action he was calling down upon himself the fate he had predicted for the Temple.  He would suffer as so many Jewish martyrs had suffered, handed over to the pagans for slaughter.  Yet, conscious of his vocation, he enacted another great symbol: the new exodus, the great liberation, encoded in a final Passover meal with his followers.  He would draw on to himself the coming cataclysm, thus making a way through, whereby the encroaching evil would be defeated, Israel would be liberated, and the saving purpose of Israel’s God for the whole world might at last be realized.

            Ashe trod this road, Jesus was conscious of a deeper vocation even than that of Messiah.  Israel’s greatest hope was that YHWH, her God, would return to her in person, coming to Zion as judge and redeemer.  In Jesus’ last great journey to Jerusalem, in his action in the Temple and the Upper Room, he dramatically symbolized that return.  It looks as though he intended to enact and embody that which, in Israel’s scriptures, YHWH had said he would do in person.  There could be no greater claim; yet the claim, though stupendous, only made sense within, could only be made from within, the context of the first-century Jewish world that bounded all Jesus’ thoughts and actions.  He went to his death believing that the hopes and fears of Israel and the world would thereby be drawn together once and for all.  This would be the great event, the culmination of Israel’s history, the redemption, the new exodus.  This was how the kingdom would come.

            Like any Jewish martyr of the period, Jesus believed firmly that if he died in obedience to the will of God he would be vindicated by being raised from the dead.  Unlike other martyrs, he seems to have believed that, since what he was doing was special, climatic, the one-off moment of Israel’s salvation, his resurrection would come without delay.  He would be raised ‘on the third day’.  Like the other things Jesus believed, this makes perfect, though startling, sense within the worldview of a first-century Jew aware of a vocation to be the means through which God would do for his people at last that which he had always promised.

            It should be clear from all this that if Paul had simply trotted out, parrot-fashion, every line of Jesus’ teaching—if he had repeated the parables, if he had tried to do again what Jesus did in announcing and inaugurating the kingdom—he would not have been endorsing Jesus, as an appropriate and loyal follower should.  He would have been denying him.  Someone who (p.180) copies exactly what a would-be Messiah does is himself trying to be a Messiah; which means denying the earlier claim.  When we see the entire sequence within the context of Jewish eschatology, we are forced to realize that for Paul to be a loyal ‘servant of Jesus Christ’, as he describes himself, could never mean that Paul would repeat Jesus’ unique, one-off announcement of the kingdom to his fellow Jews.  What we are looking for is not a parallelism between two abstract messages.  It is the appropriate continuity between two people living, and conscious of living, at different points in the eschatological timetable.

            Jesus believed it was his vocation to bring Israel’s history to its climax.  Paul believed that Jesus had succeeded in that aim.  Paul believed, in consequence of that belief and as part of his own special vocation, that he was himself now called to announce to the whole world that Israel’s history had been brought to its climax in that way.  When Paul announced ‘the gospel’ to the Gentile world, therefore, he was deliberately and consciously implementing the achievement of Jesus.  He was, as he himself said, building on the foundation, not laying another one (I Cor. 3:11).  He was not ‘founding a separate religion’.  He was not inventing a new ethical system.  He was not perpetrating a timeless scheme of salvation, a new mystery-religion divorced from the real, human Jesus of Nazareth.  He was calling the world to allegiance to its rightful Lord, the Jewish Messiah now exalted as the Jewish Messiah was always supposed to be.  A new mystery religion, focused on a mythical ‘lord’, would not have threatened anyone in the Greek or Roman world.  ‘Another king’, the human Jesus who claims cut directly across those of Caesar, did.

            This reminds us that neither for Jesus nor for Paul was the message, the announcement, a matter merely of ‘religion’.  The post-enlightenment box into which ‘religion’ has been slotted, whether by those determined to make religion irrelevant to real life or by those determined to protect religion from the ravages of real life, has nothing to do with the worldview of a first-century Jew believing that Israel’s God, the creator, was taking his power and reigning.  Jesus was not announcing ‘a new religion’; nor was Paul.  Nor was the Judaism whose expectation both were affirming a matter of ‘religion’ only.  Of course (lest ears be so dull that they translate what I am saying into its opposite)—of course the proclamation of Jesus, and the gospel announcement of Paul, addressed human beings with a challenge and a summons, a warning and an offer, which went down to the very depths of human experience, into the far recesses of the heart, awakening parts which (p.181) other messages could not reach.  But they did this, not because they were about ‘religion’ as divorced from the rest of life, but because the claim of Israel always was, the message of Jesus always was, and the announcement of Paul always was, that the human race was to be shown, invited to, summoned into, and enabled to discover the true way of being human, the way to reflect the very image of God himself in every aspect of life and with every fibre [fiber?] of one’s being.  If that is what you mean by ‘religion’, so be it.  Jesus and Paul thought of it as Life, as being human, as being the children of God.

            When all this is said and done, it should be comparatively easy to work through the actions and message of Jesus, and the agenda and letters of Paul, and to show that there is between them, not (of course) a one-for-one correspondence, but a coherence, an appropriate correlation, an integration that allows fully for the radically different perspective of each.  Jesus was bringing Israel’s history to its climax; Paul was living in the light of that climax.  Jesus was narrowly focused on the sharp-edged, single task; Paul was celebrating the success of that task, and discovering its fruits in a thousand different ways and settings.  Jesus believed he had to go the incredibly risky route of acting and speaking in such a way as to imply that he was embodying the judging and saving action of YHWH himself; Paul wrote of Jesus in such a way as to claim that Jesus was indeed the embodiment of the one God of Jewish monotheism.

            …Despite the popular impression, there are in fact a good many echoes of the actual sayings of Jesus in the letters of Paul, though here again Paul has not been a slavish repeater of tradition so much as faithful rethinker of the rich material he has heard, using it in fresh ways for his own very different context.  What mattes, far above any attempts to place Jesus and Paul one on each side of a theological see-saw and make them balance out, is to grasp the truth that grasped them both: that in their day, and through their agency—the one as focus, the other as pointer—the one living and true God had acted climatically and decisively to liberate Israel and the world, and to establish his kingdom of love, the kingdom through which the world would be brought out of the long winter of sin and death and would taste at last the fruits of the Age to Com. (p.182)