Paul and the Good Life

Transformation and Citizenship in the Commonwealth of God

Julien C. H. Smith

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781481313117
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblische Studien

Salvation and human flourishing—a life marked by fulfillment and well-being—have often been divorced in the thinking and practice of the church. For the apostle Paul, however, the two were inseparable in the vision for the good life. Drawing on the revolutionary teachings and kingdom proclamation of Jesus, Paul and the early church issued a challenge to the ancient world's dominant narratives of flourishing. Paul's conviction of Jesus' universal Lordship emboldened him to imagine not just another world, but this world as it might be when transformed.

With Paul and the Good Life, Julien Smith introduces us afresh to Paul's vision for the life of human flourishing under the reign of Jesus. By placing Paul's letters in conversation with both ancient virtue ethics and kingship discourse, Smith outlines the Apostle's christologically shaped understanding of the good life. Numerous Hellenistic philosophical traditions situated the individual cultivation of virtue within the larger telos of the flourishing polis. Against this backdrop, Paul regards the church as a heavenly commonwealth whose citizens are being transformed into the character of its king, Jesus. Within this vision, salvation entails both deliverance from the deforming power of sin and the re-forming of the person and the church through embodied allegiance to Jesus. Citizenship within this commonwealth calls for a countercultural set of virtues, ones that foster unity amidst diversity and the care of creation.

Smith concludes by enlisting the help of present-day interlocutors to draw out the implications of Paul's argument for our own context. The resulting conversation aims to place Paul in engagement with missional hermeneutics, spiritual disciplines, liturgical formation, and agrarianism. Ultimately, Paul and the Good Life invites us to imagine how citizens of this heavenly commonwealth might live in the in-between time, in which Jesus's reign has been inaugurated but not consummated.

Chapter 1

Salvation and the Good Life

Ancient Conversations

1. Salvation: Eternal Life and/or the Good Life?

What must I do to inherit eternal life? What must I do to obtain the good life? The first question is posed by a young man to Jesus in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 10:17). The second is the implicit question animating Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and much of the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition of what is commonly called “virtue ethics.”1 On the face of it, these two questions are not remarkably different. Both inquire into the means by which a desirable or richly full life may be acquired. And yet, within the Christian tradition, these two questions have frequently been understood to be asking vastly different things. The first question has often been understood to concern salvation, conceived of as an existence that begins after death. One is saved, or granted entrance into this postmortem existence, by the atoning death of Jesus, believed by faith, received by grace.2 The second question has often been understood by many believers, and others, to pertain to the quality of life prior to death. In response to this question, Aristotle and others insisted that one strive to obtain and exemplify the moral virtues, or excellences of character.3 On this account, eternal life and the good life are reckoned to be two different sorts of life, acquired in two radically different ways.

Nevertheless, rather confusingly, the first question has sometimes been answered in a way that depends upon the second question. That is, some within the Christian tradition have claimed that one is saved by some combination of grace and moral effort. On this account, eternal life depends in some measure upon the pursuit of the good life. The evident tension between these two understandings of salvation has given birth to great confusion, not to mention wrenching conflict, throughout the history of the church.4 And this confusion can be at least partially attributed to Paul himself. To the church in Ephesus he writes, “For by grace you have been saved by faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph 2:8).5 But he exhorts the Philippian believers to “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12). Which is it—salvation by grace, moral effort, or some combination of the two? The roots of the confusion, however, go deeper than Paul’s own apparent vacillations. It is not simply a question of whether or not salvation requires moral effort in addition to divine grace and what the relationship between grace and moral effort might be. It is rather a question of whether or not eternal life and the good life are in any way comparable concepts. The following analogy may help clarify the issue.

Consider the question, “If one wants go to Disney World for vacation, is it better to travel by car or by boat?” This question aims to find out which mode of transportation enables one to reach the destination in the most efficient manner. One could debate the merits of travel by car or boat, taking into consideration the starting point of the voyage, season of the year, weather, price of gasoline, and so forth. This question of the best means to reach a given, desired destination is analogous to the way the church has typically understood the relationship between eternal life and the good life. The analogy works this way: Disney World is the destination (eternal life), and the car (pursuing the good life through moral effort aimed at the acquisition of virtue) and the boat (grace) are two modes of reaching the same destination.

Now consider the question, “Which would be a better vacation—a road trip or cruise?” This question is not interested in the efficiency of transportation (no destination is predetermined or even mentioned), but rather the choice hinges only on the quality of the experience of traveling. The debate here would consider which mode of travel conforms best to the traveler’s idea of a vacation. In the first question, the car and the boat only relate to the destination insofar as they allow a traveler to reach it. The destination and the mode of travel are not comparable. In the second question, the car and the boat offer comparable experiences—each is being considered as a type of vacation. The second question offers an analogy for understanding the relationship between eternal life and the good life as comparable terms or experiences of life. The analogy works this way: a road trip (the good life) and a cruise (eternal life) each represent a type of experience in and of themselves, similar in that both are types of vacation, but different in the quality of vacation (or life) that they represent.

Back to Paul. This tension between grace and moral effort in Paul’s soteriology stems, at least in part, from the assumption that eternal life and the good life are incomparable concepts for Paul. The latter relates to the former, if at all, merely instrumentally. In other words, many modern Christians approach Paul’s letters as though he is answering the question “What must I do to be saved?”, which they interpret to mean “How can I get to heaven when I die?”6

My argument in this book suggests that this assumption ought to be reconsidered. For Paul, eternal life and the good life are inextricably bound together in his concept of salvation. The good life is not a means to another, different destination, but a part of the process.

What, then, is the nature of salvation? That depends upon whether one is being saved from something or to something. We can think of salvation as “rescue from life-threatening peril”—for example, saving a drowning person. But we can also think of salvation as “restoring to wholeness”—for example, saving someone from addiction to drugs. These concepts of salvation are obviously related, and one could indeed argue that the first concept (rescue) is already contained within the second (restoration). To restore a person to wholeness who is addicted to drugs already implies some kind of a rescue from the daily activity of drug use and its attendant problems.7 But the reverse is not necessarily true. There might well be nothing “un-whole” about the drowning person that would require restoration. Paul, I believe, has both these concepts in mind when he writes about salvation through the death of Jesus.

But in many Christian circles, the former—rescue from imminent peril—is emphasized to the neglect of the latter—a process of restoring wholeness amidst damage. Many Christians rightly believe that Jesus died to save one from sin, but are puzzled by whether and how this death also restores one’s humanity to a better and richer condition. Holding together these two aspects of salvation is difficult for non-Christians as well, but for the opposite reason. Many outside the church, for example, would acknowledge that human beings often need to be restored to wholeness. Even as I write, our nation is suffering an epidemic of opioid addiction from which many thousands need both rescuing and restoring. Yet those outside the church would likely be puzzled by the suggestion that the demonstrable problem of opioid addiction might have anything to do with the hypothetical problem of sin—a deeper deficiency underlying particular ailments. From the Pauline perspective from which I am arguing, confusion regarding the nature of salvation thus pervades our thinking not only within the church but also outside it.8

In fact, confusion outside the church may stem from confusion within it. Consider this thought experiment. Imagine asking a non-Christian, “What do Christians, in your view, believe about the following concepts: guilt, sin, God, Jesus, heaven, and hell?” You might well receive an answer that runs something like this: “The Christian God is a distant celestial record-keeper who is endlessly offended by human moral failure, or sin, and scrupulously demands that all offenses must be punished. Since you are guilty of sin, you will be punished in hell when you die. If you believe in Jesus, however, you will be saved and go to heaven.”

Now imagine asking your interlocutor whether she finds this account of salvation persuasive, or even plausible. I expect the answer would be, “Not so much.”

A dramatic literary tale may illustrate the pervasiveness of this kind of thinking about salvation. I recently watched a television adaptation of a short story by the late American science-fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. The episode, entitled “Real Life” and based upon Dick’s story “Exhibit Piece,” explores the mysterious correspondence between the lives of two characters who interact with one another by means of virtual reality. One is a female cop from the future, the other a male virtual-reality designer living in the present. In fact, over the course of the story we discover that the two characters are one and the same person. Only one, however, is a real person; the other exists only in the realm of the real person’s subconscious. The viewer soon realizes the central question of the story: Which person is real?

The female cop from the future lives a “perfect” life, yet she is haunted by vague feelings of guilt, which in the end prove to be illusory. She has not, in fact, done anything to deserve these feelings of guilt. By contrast, the present-day male tech mogul lives a miserable life, wracked with actual guilt—a keen awareness of his own sin.9 When the future cop descends from her perfect world into the virtual world of the guilt-wracked tech mogul, it seems as though she is paying for the “heavenly” life she does not deserve by experiencing the “hellish” misery of another. If this character is the real one, then she ought to “wake up” to the reality that her feelings of guilt and unworthiness are merely an illusion.

When the present-day tech mogul escapes into the virtual world of the future cop, this perfect life affords him a brief respite from the miserable consequences of his moral failing and the guilt that plagues him as a result. If this character is the real person, then the story would suggest that guilt is the appropriate consequence to sin. For this character, to “wake up” and live in the real world would be to deal with the real consequences of sin.

Both characters in this short story are seeking a salvation of sorts by means of virtual reality; they each hope to escape—to be rescued from—their feelings of guilt. But which of these characters is real? Put differently, which of these stories seems most plausible within the modern Western world we inhabit? Do we live in the world of the cop from the future, in which sin and guilt are really just figments of our imagination, a hangover from the days of bad religion? Or do we live in the world of the present-day tech mogul, in which sin and guilt are realities we must face, and perhaps even pay for?10

The episode’s dramatic conclusion answers this question (spoiler alert).11 The tech mogul (whose guilt for sin is real) turns out to be a figment of the imagination of the cop from the future (whose guilt is merely illusory). Thus the story implies that sin and guilt are not realities that must be addressed but merely false projections of our subconscious that can be safely ignored. If sin is not real, what need is there to be rescued from its consequences? Insofar as this story captures something of the contemporary Zeitgeist (“spirit of the age”), it suggests that the modern Western world finds the Christian notion of salvation—such as it understands it—thoroughly implausible.12

The world did not get this picture of salvation from nowhere. It got it from the church, and the church got it from Paul. This picture, I hasten to add, is not incorrect so much as incomplete. Paul himself says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 6:23). The first part of this sentence clearly indicates that sin is a life-threatening peril from which one must be rescued. No argument there.

The problem lies in how the church has often understood the second part of that sentence. Some Christians over the centuries have tended to assume that eternal life refers exclusively to life after death. If one is saved by Jesus’ death, then when one dies, one receives not the just penalty for sin, eternal damnation, but rather the free gift, eternal life. On this understanding, eternal life is largely if not entirely divorced from the good life, the day-to-day life we now live in the present. Paul, however, sees eternal life rather as a christologically redefined version of the good life, a type of life that one enters in the present and which continues eternally.13

To be saved, then, is not merely to be rescued from the penalty of sin so that we go to heaven rather than hell when we die. To be saved, in Paul’s words, is to be “rescued . . . from the power of darkness and transferred . . . into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col 1:13). To be saved clearly implies a divine rescue operation, but it equally involves being made whole as one lives under the reign, and in the power, of Jesus the king.

2. Jesus: The King Who Liberates and Transforms

This book is about what it meant for Paul to view Jesus as the Messiah of the God of Israel, as God’s anointed king over his people Israel, and ultimately over all creation. It is also about what that fact might mean for contemporary readers of Paul in the present. In the ancient Mediterranean world, kings were routinely thought of as saviors (Greek: sōtēr). But an ancient Mediterranean auditor would not have understood that term to mean “one who saves others from the consequences of sin so that they can go to heaven when they die.” Rather, the term sōtēr evoked a victorious king who had defeated a tyrant in battle and liberated those held in thrall by the tyrant.14 The orator and popular philosopher Dio Chrysostom (ca. 40–120 CE) describes the good king as “the savior (sōtēr) and protector of men everywhere” (Or. 3.6)15 In this vein, Dio claims that Heracles deserves the epithet sōtēr for having delivered the entire world from tyranny:

This . . . was what made him Deliverer (sōtēr) of the earth and of the human race, . . . the fact that he chastised savage and wicked men, and crushed and destroyed the power of overweening tyrants. And even to this day Heracles continues this work and you have in him a helper and protector of your government as long as it is vouchsafed you to reign. (Or. 1.84)

Naturally, when Paul refers to Jesus as sōtēr (e.g., Phil 3:20), he would expect his audience to hear in that term its wider cultural resonance. To gain an understanding of that perspective widely shared by Paul’s first-century hearers and readers, I shall present throughout this book a good deal of literary material illustrating how people in Mediterranean antiquity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Salvation and the Good Life
• 2. Citizenship
• 3. Character
• 4. Community
• 5. Creation
• 6. Paul and the Good Life
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Scripture and Ancient Sources