Jesus Have I Loved, but Paul?

A Narrative Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity

Kirk, J. R. Daniel

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441236258
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Readers of the Bible are often drawn to Jesus's message and ministry, but they are not as positively inclined toward Paul. What should people who love Jesus do with Paul? Here Pauline scholar J. R. Daniel Kirk offers a fresh and timely engagement of the debated relationship between Paul's writings and the portrait of Jesus contained in the Gospels. He integrates the messages of Jesus and Paul both with one another and with the Old Testament, demonstrating the continuity that exists between these two foundational figures. After laying out the narrative contours of the Christian life, Kirk provides fresh perspective on challenging issues facing today's world, from environmental concerns to social justice to homosexuality.

1

Jesus Stories in the Gospels and Paul

The only “system” in Holy Scripture and proclamation is revelation, i.e., Jesus Christ.

—Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics[5]

To understand the Jesus story that awaits us when we turn to the New Testament, we must be attuned to it as a climactic scene in the larger story of Israel. This is how both the Gospel writers and Paul invite us to make sense of the significance of Jesus. What Christians refer to as the “Old Testament,” what for Paul and Jesus were simply the Writings or “the Law and the Prophets,” contains a narrative awaiting a dramatic conclusion. The story that holds together the Gospels and Paul might be summarized like this: the God of Israel acted decisively in the person of Jesus to restore God’s rule and reconcile the whole world to himself. If this sounds to your ears more like a scene than a fully developed plot, then you begin to see the importance of locating Jesus within the larger narrative sweep of which his life is a part.

The God of Israel

Growing up in church circles, I observed that the adults around me talked about God using all-encompassing adjectives such as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. To such a list of somewhat abstract traits we might also add the claim that “God is good.” The importance of naming such descriptors was to help introduce us to the God we serve. To understand God was to know which attributes applied.

But there was a surprise awaiting me when I turned to study the Bible a bit more closely. Though such apparently timeless, abstract categories are not entirely absent from the Bible, the key ways of naming God describe him as someone who is at work within and even bound to the story of Israel. God in the Scriptures is “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”; “the God of the Hebrews”; “the God who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The point here is simply to signal that we fall into a trap if we think we have identified God by simply stating what God is (eternal, infinite, unchangeable) without showing who God is.

The God we are talking about when we talk about the God who is at work in Jesus is the God who has bound himself to the story of Israel. This means both that the God who is worthy of our worship has acted to save Israel from countless enemies past (the story of the Old Testament) and that this God is bound by a promise to bring about one more climactic act of deliverance. This new act of redemption would fully restore God’s people to the glory he had promised. In other words, to read the Scriptures of Israel is to discover not only that God has a past, with a complex relationship to one particular people, but also that God has a future, in which all those relational complications will be resolved. Both the Gospels and Paul claim that this is the God at work in their gospel message, and both claim that Israel’s long-anticipated deliverance is the purpose of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

The opening verses of each Gospel (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) issue invitations to read the ensuing stories as ones in which the God of Israel is once again at work. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is bringing the narrative of Israel to its long-awaited conclusion. To take but one example, Mark begins like this: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, ‘Behold! I am sending my messenger before of you, who will prepare your way’ ” (Mark 1:1–2).[6] The good news about Jesus begins with God acting to fulfill what the prophets spoke long before. The God who is at work here, to send John the Baptist and then Jesus after him, is the God who spoke by Israel’s prophets. Isaiah’s (and the Old Testament’s) long-awaited future is Jesus’s present. God is the main character of the biblical narrative, and the Jesus stories of the Gospels claim to be God’s long-anticipated return to bring the narrative to its definitive resolution.

Turn to Paul and you find an identical claim. Paul introduces Romans with an indication that the letter is read aright only when we see how it proclaims the great, climactic work of the God of Israel to bring the story of the Hebrews to its promised conclusion.[7] Here is how the letter begins: “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God that God promised beforehand, in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son” (Rom. 1:1–3). The similarities with Mark are striking. The gospel message is about God’s Son. That message comes in fulfillment of the promises spoken in the Scriptures of Israel. And this message about the Son is simultaneously the story where God is at work (this last point becomes more clear as one moves through the letter). Jesus is the embodiment of God’s making good on the ancient promise to bring Israel’s story to a saving end.

Both the Gospels and Paul intend to show us that Jesus’s story is God’s story. Depending on where you come from, this might be obvious to the point of being trite, or it might be the key to unlocking the whole mystery of the relationship between Jesus and Paul. For now, I simply draw our attention to the fact that Paul couches his narrative of the saving Christ in terms almost identical to Mark’s. As our study unfolds, it will become increasingly apparent that God, precisely as the God of Israel, holds the story together from start to finish in both the Gospels and the letters of Paul.

Israel

Getting Israel firmly on the table is crucial for a couple of reasons. First, it helps to ensure that when we talk about God we know which God we are talking about: the God of Israel. Thus, this discussion is very closely tied to the previous section. It also draws our attention to the story within which Jesus’s and Paul’s missions both make sense. As both Paul and the four Gospels depict the Jesus story, we discover that Jesus simultaneously meets and transforms the expectations of ancient Israel. We need to recognize why Israel’s good news is good news for the rest of us as well.

From early on, the story of Israel is one of a scandalous particularity: God elects one nation from all the peoples of the earth. And yet it is a particularity in service of a worldwide vision: God elects Israel to mediate God’s presence and blessing to the world. This is something we have to allow to sink deep into our minds and hearts if we are to sing out in response to what the New Testament so often depicts as the “good news.” Simply put, because the God who created all things has chosen to be the God of Israel, salvation must therefore come through this particular people, in accordance with the promises that God spoke through Israel’s prophets.

Israel as New Creation

Reaching back to the beginning of all things, Israel told the story of the world, and of people in it, as the prelude to its own story. In fact, Israel’s unfolding drama reads as the story of one nation that God has chosen to play the role that God had first assigned to humanity as a whole. Hints of this come as the creation narrative is echoed in later stories. At the beginning, God blesses humanity with the mandate to be fruitful and multiply (Gen. 1:28). Later, when God establishes covenants with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he promises to make them fruitful and multiply them (Gen. 16:10; 17:6, 20; 22:17; 26:4, 24; 28:3; 35:11; 48:4). The original blessing of creation is focused on the forefathers of Israel.

We also read in Genesis 1:26–27 that God creates people with one particular function: to rule the world on God’s behalf. And we then find a promise to Abraham that from his line kings will arise (Gen. 17:6). Humanity’s calling to rule the world on God’s behalf will be fulfilled by the kings of Israel who perform precisely this function. The story of Israel is the story of God’s refusal to give up on humanity. It is the story of God re-creating humanity through this one people, Israel, to whom God has chosen to bind himself.

The reason God chooses to focus humanity’s purpose in Israel is not for Israel’s sake alone. Rather, Israel will be the protagonist who works good for the sake of the world. And so the forefather of Israel, Abraham, is promised more. Yes, he will be fruitful and multiply, and yes, kings will come from him. But God also tells Abraham that he will be the conduit for God’s blessing to the nations of the earth: “I will bless those who bless you, those who curse you I will curse, and all the families of the earth will bless themselves by your name” (Gen. 12:3). If God is the source of Abraham’s blessing, Abraham is the source of the world’s blessing. This means that the only way for the world to be blessed is for God to bless Israel first. And this is why the story of Jesus, in both the Gospels and in Paul, is the story of Israel brought to its God-ordained climax.[8] God is making good on the promise to Abraham to bless the entire world through Israel.

Israel’s Future

The story of Israel becomes, over the course of the biblical narrative, a tale of unrequited love leading to national disaster. Israel’s failure to live up to God’s calling to be the obedient, faithful representatives of humanity lands the people in exile. A people who had been promised a land was carted off to another country. A people who had been promised abundant descendants was decimated in war. A people who had been promised a king was living in subjection to foreign overlords. A people who had been promised the presence of God had its temple destroyed. A people who had been promised prosperity had been plundered.

Israel’s prophets were unflinching in their prognostications of exile, but they were even more expansive in their hopes for restoration. Among the many promises for the future were the following: there would be a new king from the line of David who would rule God’s people faithfully and thereby lead God’s people into faithfulness (e.g., Ezek. 34:23–24; 37:24–28); God would pour out his own spirit so that people would be transformed, given new hearts, and thereby made able to obey God for the first time (e.g., Isa. 44:1–5; Jer. 31:31–34); the people would be on the land, free from foreign overlords, and the land would produce for them in abundance (Jer. 31; Ezek. 34, 37); the temple would be gloriously restored, greater than before, and God would fill the temple with his presence (e.g., Ezek. 40–47; Hag. 2:6–9). All this glorification of Israel would, in turn, glorify the God of Israel in the sight of all the nations so that they, looking on the transformed, restored people of God would be drawn to worship Israel’s God (Isa. 56:1–8; 60:1–22).

When the Old Testament draws to a close, this vision of glory is all in the future tense. The people had, in fact, come back from exile, but they were not yet free on their own land. They had no king, being subjected still to the rule of the nations. There was a rebuilt temple, but it was pitiful compared to the old. There was no glory of Israel with which to draw the nations to glorify Israel’s God.

The Gospels as Israel’s Future

So when we pick up the Gospels and read about the generations from Abraham to David to the exile to Jesus (Matt. 1:1–17), or the declaration from Mark, cited above, that the subsequent story is what is spoken in the prophets, we need to pause to consider two things. First, each Gospel narrates the claim that the prophets’ future tense has now become present reality with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Second, it is only by completing the story of Israel that salvation can go out to the nations.

Luke’s Gospel provides a striking example of how the Jesus story provides the resolution to Israel’s previously unfinished drama. The angel announcing Jesus’s birth to his mother, Mary, says that Jesus will be given the throne of David and will rule over the house of Jacob (Luke 1:32–33). In her own song celebrating Jesus’s coming birth, Mary anticipates that a new reign will be established and old kings deposed because God is going to fulfill the promise spoken to Abraham and his descendants (Luke 1:52–55). And in a song that weaves an elaborate tapestry from the threads of Old Testament promises, Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, sings about God redeeming his people; about God raising up a king in David’s line who will save; about fulfilled prophecies of deliverance from enemies; about God remembering and acting on the covenants sworn to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, creating a people who can serve God righteously; and about all of this as God’s salvation to the people of Israel (Luke 1:68–79).

Luke certainly intends for us to see Jesus’s story bringing the story of Israel to its climactic resolution. But there is a surprise in store as well, something so shocking that his disciples could not believe it even when Jesus told them plainly. The means by which all these great promises of redemption and restoration would come to pass would be through the Messiah’s death, resurrection, and exaltation. And so Luke concludes the story of the Gospel with the resurrected Jesus appearing to his disciples and telling them what the Scriptures say about the Messiah (that is, about him).

He said to them, “These are my words which I spoke to you while I was still with you: It is necessary for all that is written about me in the law of Moses and in the Prophets and in the Psalms to be fulfilled!” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures and said to them, “Thus is it is written that the Messiah has to die and rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance leading to forgiveness of sins has to be proclaimed in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” (Luke 24:44–47)

The fulfillment of Scripture’s expectations about the Messiah who would rule the world on God’s behalf comes to pointed realization with the crucifixion and resurrection. This is how Israel is going to know the forgiveness that can lead to its restoration; this is the light that will enlighten the nations. Shortly thereafter (Luke 24:49) Jesus promises the Spirit to the disciples, providing them another clue as to how Jesus’s death and resurrection form the fulcrum point on which Israel’s story turns.

We will wrestle with several implications of this story in more detail as we work our way through the various issues that confront us in Jesus’s ministry. For now the important takeaway is that Jesus as we meet him on the pages of the Gospels is not living out a self-contained story. He is acting out a final, climactic scene in the ongoing drama of Israel that stretches back to creation and comes to its promised resolution with his death and resurrection. And we see the same claim in Paul.

Paul’s Churches and Israel’s Future

The Corinthian correspondence is a treasure trove of indications that Paul reads the story of Jesus as the continuation and climax of the story of Israel. Once we have our minds tuned to the frequency of Paul’s storytelling, we can receive how he wants his non-Jewish (gentile) churches to reconceive their own identities. They have been scripted into the story of Israel. Israel’s God is their God. Israel’s people is their people. Israel’s hopes are their reality. To help us get hold of this, we will look at one indication that the Corinthians share in Israel’s past and one indication that they are participating in Israel’s hoped-for future.

Paul wants the Corinthians to know that Israel’s past has become the church’s story as well. In 1 Corinthians 10 he draws on stories from the exodus narrative and the book of Numbers to encourage the church to faithful perseverance. He begins, “For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea” (1 Cor. 10:1). As is so often the case, Paul addresses the church in familial terms: “brothers and sisters.” As such, he beckons them to look back on their common ancestry: our fathers were all under the cloud of God’s presence. But the church that Paul is addressing is made up completely of gentiles, while the “fathers” in the exodus story are all Jewish. Paul has written his gentile converts so thoroughly into the Jewish story that they, no less than Jews physically descended from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, can look back to the trials of the exodus generation and see in those forebears their own fathers and mothers.[9] They have a new story. We begin to understand Paul only when we see that his is a narrative theology in which the story of Israel plays a determinative role in forming the identity of the people of God.

Not only is Israel’s past the past of the church, Israel’s hoped-for future has begun in the church’s present. Recall in our summary of Israel’s story that we mentioned how Israel was to be a blessing to the nations. In particular, Israel as a glorified people, among whom God’s presence is clearly manifest, was to be the means by which the nations would be drawn to glorify Israel’s God.

One verse that anticipates the nations in such a posture of glorifying Israel’s God is Isaiah 45:14, where the gentiles proclaim, “God is with you alone, and there is no other” (NRSV).[10] Paul picks up this verse and inserts it into his discussion of spiritual gifts in 1 Corinthians 14. How is it that God’s glory is so made known among the nations that they fall on their faces, glorifying God, declaring that God is certainly among the people? It is by God’s pouring out the Spirit on the church, the body of Christ, so that by the Spirit’s power the people may prophesy. Israel’s role of drawing the nations to worship Yahweh has now become the calling of the church. The church not only adopts the story of Israel’s past; it also becomes the story of Israel’s hoped-for future.

The upshot of all this is that the story of the church is intelligible only as the continuation of the story of Israel. Paul is not merely making arguments in his letters; he is narrating the story of Israel with his gentile churches as full participants in that drama. Paul also understands that we not only interpret stories but also are interpreted by them. And so we discover that Paul is a narrative theologian, striving to help his churches understand a new past, present, and future that are all-determinative for their identity, now that they are followers of Jesus. To understand who they are in Christ, Paul’s gentile churches, no less than we, require a comprehensive reframing of their story, what Richard Hays refers to as a “conversion of the imagination.”[11]

Jesus Restores God’s Rule

If the gospel story is the story of Israel’s God, it is still an open question what role this God might assign to the principal New Testament protagonist, and how such a character will relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Jesus Stories in the Gospels and Paul
• 2 New Creation and the Kingdom of God
• 3 Christianity as Community
• 4 Living Out the Jesus Narrative
• 5 Judgment and Inclusion
• 6 Women in the Story of God
• 7 Liberty and Justice for All?
• 8 Sex in the Plot of God’s Stories
• 9 Homosexuality under the Reign of Christ
• 10 Living Interpretations
• Notes
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover