Pauline Dogmatics

The Triumph of God's Love

Douglas A. Campbell

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781467458221
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The eschatological heart of Paul's gospel in his world and its implications for today

Drawing upon thirty years of intense study and reflection on Paul, Douglas Campbell offers a distinctive overview of the apostle's thinking that builds on Albert Schweitzer's classic emphasis on the importance for Paul of the resurrection. But Campbell—learning here from Karl Barth—traces through the implications of Christ for Paul's thinking about every other theological topic, from revelation and the resurrection through the nature of the church and mission. As he does so, the conversation broadens to include Stanley Hauerwas in relation to Christian formation, and thinkers like Willie Jennings to engage post-colonial concerns.

But the result of this extensive conversation is a work that, in addition to providing a description of Paul's theology, also equips readers with what amounts to a Pauline manual for church planting. Good Pauline theology is good practical theology, ecclesiology, and missiology, which is to say, Paul's theology belongs to the church and, properly understood, causes the church to flourish. In these conversations Campbell pushes through interdisciplinary boundaries to explicate different aspects of Pauline community with notions like network theory and restorative justice.

The book concludes by moving to applications of Paul in the modern period to painful questions concerning gender, sexual activity, and Jewish inclusion, offering Pauline navigations that are orthodox, inclusive, and highly constructive.

Beginning with the God revealed in Jesus, and in a sense with ourselves, Campbell progresses through Pauline ethics and eschatology, concluding that the challenge for the church is not only to learn about Paul but to follow Jesus as he did.

PART 1

Resurrection

CHAPTER 1

Jesus

The Question of God

This book, like a lot of books written by and addressed to Christians and other followers of Jesus—although by no means excluding anyone else from entering into the conversation—is an extended instance of God-talk. It talks about God and wants to do so accurately, or “in truth” as the Bible sometimes puts it. But if this is the case, an important question must be addressed immediately. How do we know what God is like? If we don’t know God, we will probably not be able to talk about God with any accuracy, and so we will end up, as Barth puts it wryly, talking about ourselves in a loud voice, which is unlikely to be much help to anyone. Any discussion of Paul, who is our principal conversation partner in what follows, raises this question immediately and acutely. His texts are nothing more than extended and at times quite authoritative instances of God-talk. How do we know that his talk of God is true? How do we know that our derivative talk of God is true? (How do we know that any talk of God is true?) Paul gives clear answers to these most important of questions, although not perhaps in the way we might at first expect.

In the spring of 51 CE Paul wrote the following statement to a group of fractious converts living in Corinth:¹

For us there is one God, the Father,

from whom everything has its existence, and we exist for him,

and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ,

through whom everything exists, and we exist through him. (1 Cor 8:6)²

In the part of this ancient letter that we now know as chapter 8, Paul is addressing a point of conflict at Corinth involving eating meat that in Jewish eyes was polluting. It had not been properly drained of blood, and it was often being consumed in a hired dining booth that was far too close to pagan temples and their images—a doubly disgusting practice. Members of the Corinthian church who had Jewish sensibilities were deeply offended by fellow church members who were doing all this.

Paul bases his instructions in chapters 8–10 about how to handle this situation on the claims I just quoted. They are the foundation stone for his unfolding argument. And it is clear from the immediate context that Paul is not using the word “lord” here in its generic ancient sense of someone in a superior social position, namely, a ruler or master or aristocrat. In this general sense we might even call our own modern managers and deans “lords.” Paul is quoting here, in a highly distinctive way, the key Jewish confession concerning God, which was drawn from chapter 6 in the book of Deuteronomy. “Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD alone.” Jews refer to this verse as the Shema, the Hebrew for “hear,” which begins the verse, and the pious recited it every day. But 1 Cor 8:6 does something very challenging with this confession. Paul distributes the Shema between “God the Father” and “the Lord Jesus,” all the while holding on, somewhat extraordinarily, to the unity of God. There is one divinity, although within this unity, there is someone called God the Father and someone called the Lord Jesus, two titles Paul uses a lot.³ This move is then emphasized as Paul speaks of Jesus sustaining the creation, which is an activity that the Jewish Scriptures reserve for God. It is clear, then, that whatever other questions we might now have, Paul is using “lord” in the specialized Jewish sense of a substitute name for God.⁴ Furthermore, he is applying it to Jesus. And it follows from this observation, simply and shockingly, that Jesus is God for both Paul and the Corinthians. God is not reducible to Jesus, but God is not imaginable now without Jesus. Jesus is, as Richard Bauckham puts it carefully, part of the divine identity.⁵

It seems, then, that our critical opening question about God has just been answered, and it is one of the most important questions that we will ever ask. It is clear that Jesus will reveal God definitively and decisively as God. He is God—a momentous assertion! So to look at Jesus and to see what he is like is to look at God and to see what he is like. God is not reducible to Jesus, but if Jesus is God and if God is one, as Paul also affirms here in continuity with virtually the entirety of the Jewish tradition, then the rest of God will not be fundamentally different from Jesus. Other parts of God (so to speak) might be distinguishable from Jesus, but they will not and will never be separable from Jesus, to reach ahead to some useful Trinitarian categories. And we must not deny this claim, with its shockingly counterintuitive dimensions, or we lose everything.

Without affirming the absolute oneness of Jesus with God—his complete unity—we lose our grip on where God has chosen to be revealed fully and completely: namely, in Jesus. If Jesus is not God “all the way down,” then we are still lost in our own world with all its fantasies and illusions; we have no direct contact with God. We are hemmed in by our limited creaturely existence, now further corrupted by sin, and we do not know what God is really like. We are reduced, the theologians would say, to analogies, which means to inevitable and largely uncontrolled gaps in our understanding of what God is really like. God is like a sunset, but in what sense? Is he warm? or glowing? or fading? Clearly, none of this is quite right. God is like a mother, but in what exact sense again? Does he wear my mother’s distinctive clothes or directly biologically breast-feed us or speak in a southern drawl about picking us up from soccer? Again, clearly none of this is directly applicable, although we sense that something insightful is going on. But if we want to press on these claims and be really precise, we don’t know quite how to do so. This limitation arises because we are trying to understand a transcendent being who is fundamentally different from us, as creator to our createdness, by way of limited, emphatically nontranscendent things that this being has made, which are by the nature of the case different from him. There is a gap here that we just can’t bridge unless God has graciously bridged it from his side of the divide and become one of us and lived among us. What a gift! So we should really avoid mitigating or avoiding this gift or watering it down in any way, which means to avoid adding other potential candidates alongside in any sort of equality. God is definitively known only in Jesus. This is where God is present with us fully, and nowhere else—not in a book, a tradition, a piece of land, a building, or even in a particular people (unless, that is, he has taken up residence in one of them fully). We worship and pray to none of these things; we worship and pray to Jesus because Jesus is God, and so we know God fully and completely only as we know Jesus.

I labor this point a little because it is so central, so simple, so quickly introduced and understood, and so easily and rapidly abandoned (note Gal 1:6). We must affirm the insight that Jesus is Lord, along with all its entailments, and protect it, vigilantly resisting all other candidates for this status. (People, and especially Christians, seem to love to avoid, to marginalize, and to obscure God’s gift of God’s very being to us in Jesus for all sorts of odd reasons.)⁶ In sum, from this moment on, as I frequently tell my students, the answer to every question I ask in class, at least in some sense, is “Jesus.” Accurate God-talk is Jesus-talk. And God-talk that is not in some very direct sense Jesus-talk is probably not God-talk. Jesus is the key piece of information concerning God, in the light of which all other God-talk must be evaluated, which includes everything in this book and everything that Paul wrote. But we also risk getting a little ahead of ourselves here.

The claim by Paul that Jesus is Lord challenges us and not merely the Corinthians with a further, related question of equal importance. In fact, we cannot go on any further with our discussion until we have grappled with it and done so in a deeply personal way. We need to decide right away whether what Paul is saying here is really true. There is a sense in which we can understand his position, which is shared by many other members of the church. The rationale for the centrality of Jesus as definitively identified with, and hence revealing of, God is clear. We grasp the importance of the claim that Jesus is Lord. But how do we know that this claim is actually true?

The Question of Truth

When Paul says Jesus is God, he is clearly making an extraordinarily important claim, one that is so important that all others tend to pale into insignificance beside it. I can imagine writing a book about this claim and continuing to urge its significance some time after it has been made—two millennia to be precise—if it is true. Paul would ultimately be describing a very different reality from the one that many people inhabit on a daily basis, and yet it would be a determinative reality; it would be the one that really matters. God has been definitively revealed, in full, without reservation, in a person—specifically in a Jew who walked the earth in the early first century and was executed by the Romans around 30 CE. But he was then raised from the dead and enthroned on high, from where he rules the cosmos beside his divine Father, right now (to anticipate a few of our later findings).⁷ An entirely new approach to life is necessary if the claim concerning Jesus’s lordship is correct, one alert to the resurrecting power of Jesus working away within history. The way we explain Paul must follow accordingly. We will analyze him in relation to this hidden, dynamic, determinative reality that is the divine Jesus. Paul’s description will have visible and invisible dimensions, with the invisible dimension powerfully shaping and informing the visible. If Jesus is Lord, then he is the Lord of everything and he affects everything. Even an accurate historical account of Paul would, strictly speaking, have to take account of this multidimensional and partly hidden situation—if what he is saying here is true.

But if what he is saying is not true, then a very different book would be required. One could write a book on Paul as a matter of purely antiquarian interest, but we would have to explain him in terms he did not himself share. We would supply some alternative account of his extraordinary and—to put matters plainly—rather unhinged claims about reality, such as the idea that people are in some invisible but quite concrete way affected by a God identified with a person who is dead. People are locked away under state supervision for saying less. A description of Paul in these terms would be a much more visible and one-dimensional affair, and the sort of history it recounted would be very different. (And, to be frank, if this is the case, I would be writing about something more relevant and important than this ancient and somewhat deluded figure—and I wouldn’t be a Christian either.)

So we need to ask whether this claim is true. Is it true to claim that Jesus is really God? If he is, then the implications are worth addressing carefully, and our description of those implications will be overtly theological. God will be at work, hopefully both then and now, in Paul’s lifetime and in our own. But if Jesus is not God, then Paul, I, and not a few of my friends are of all people to be pitied. So how do we judge the truth of this claim that the brightest minds of humankind have struggled with in one form or another from the dawn of civilization?

Here Paul gives us a clue, and somewhat in opposition to the brightest minds in history. “Where is the sage? Where is the academic? Where is the intellectual of this age? Has God not shown th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1. Resurrection
• Part 2. Formation
• Part 3. Mission
• Part 4. Navigation
• A Brief Retrospective Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Texts