Paul and Union with Christ

Constantine R. Campbell

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780310523185
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Paul and Union with Christ fills the gap for biblical scholars, theologians, and pastors pondering and debating the meaning of union with Christ.

Following a selective survey of the scholarly work on union with Christ through the twentieth century to the present day, Greek scholar Constantine Campbell carefully examines every occurrence of the phrases 'in Christ', 'with Christ', 'through Christ', 'into Christ, ' and other related expressions, exegeting each passage in context and taking into account the unique lexical contribution of each Greek preposition. Campbell then builds a holistic portrayal of Paul's thinking and engages contemporary theological discussions about union with Christ by employing his evidence-based understanding of the theme.

This volume combines high-level scholarship and a concern for practical application of a topic currently debated in the academy and the church. More than a monograph, this book is a helpful reference tool for students, scholars, and pastors to consult its treatment of any particular instance of any phrase or metaphor that relates to union with Christ in the Pauline corpus.

Part 1

Introductory Matters

Chapter 1

Introduction and Methodology

1.1 Paul and Union with Christ

The theme of union with Christ in the writings of the apostle Paul is at once dazzling and perplexing. Its prevalence on every page of his writings demonstrates his proclivity for the concept, and yet nowhere does he directly explain what he means by it. This creates a problem for any student of Paul’s theology, since union with Christ is both important yet obtuse.

These two realities have amply been demonstrated in the New Testament scholarship of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume of scholarly activity conducted in search for Paul’s meaning speaks to the obtuseness of union with Christ. The degree of controversy surrounding the theme speaks to its importance. Consequently, two of the central concerns addressed in this book include what union with Christ actually is and what role it performs in Paul’s theology.

The path to addressing these concerns is not straightforward. As explained below, we cannot presume to speak of Paul’s theology before engaging his writings through detailed exegesis. And yet, it is difficult to know what to look for in exegesis if we have not already determined what Paul considers to be relevant to the theme of union with Christ. While building on previous advances of scholarship, I take nothing for granted in this book. Instead, it represents a fresh investigation of the Pauline material, examining the exegetical minutiae and moving through to the wide spheres of Paul’s thought. The work is therefore self-consciously exegetical-theological, allowing exegesis to shape theology and vice versa.

1.2 An Exegetical-Theological Approach

Within the literature concerning the theme of union with Christ, there appear two opposite tendencies among various methodological approaches. Some contributors write of union with Christ as a broad theological concept that is used within a theological matrix of ideas and themes within the Pauline canon. It is discussed in relation to justification, trinitarianism, ethics, and so forth. This is a valid and important direction to be pursued, since union with Christ is connected to many such themes within Paul’s writings; it is a theologised concept. One weakness of such an approach, however, is that the theme almost immediately turns abstract, sometimes without careful analysis of the key texts that give rise to the conception of union with Christ—that is, without an exegetically derived description of what union with Christ is. While it is important to understand how this theme relates to other themes and to Paul’s theology as a whole, the conclusions of some investigations must be received with caution, since the detailed groundwork has yet to be established.

By contrast, some contributors investigate union with Christ on a purely terminological basis, focusing on a Pauline ‘formula’—usually ἐν Χριστῷ—and exploring the various uses of the formula in the contexts in which it is found.1 Again, this is an important and valuable endeavour since it is the kind of exploration that produces the groundwork sometimes missing from the aforementioned approach. A weakness here, however, is that the discussion can become severely limited, as though a phrase such as ἐν Χριστῷ tells the whole story of the theme of union with Christ.2 Even from a purely exegetical approach, it is apparent that the ideas expressed by ἐν Χριστῷ are related to other phrases too, such as σὺν Χριστῷ, εἰς Χριστόν, and διὰ Χριστοῦ.3 In other words, ‘pure exegesis’ leads away from a narrow investigation of ἐν Χριστῷ alone and requires the inclusion of other elements of Paul’s language.

But is there such a thing as ‘pure exegesis’ in the first place? Paul was a theologian and, while not ‘systematic’ in modern terms, he presented his thinking through the interaction of themes that are broader than the use of so-called formulas. Consequently, a proper approach to Paul must be theological as well as exegetical. Indeed, for a theological writer such as Paul, the two approaches become inextricably entwined. In this book, therefore, exegesis and theology will be conducted hand in hand, while the structure of the book (to be explained below) will move from an exegetical pole to a theological one. We will begin with attention to the details of Paul’s language, investigating the relevant phrases in context, then widening the scope to consider metaphorical devices. From there, the interest becomes dominantly theological as the results of the exegetical analyses are interpreted with respect to Paul’s broader thought. This study, then, is exegetical-theological, belonging to the discipline of New Testament theology. It will be apparent that this differs from traditional systematic theology in that it begins with textual minutiae and develops through to the conceptual big picture; it does not start with the whole, but progresses from one pole to the other.

1.3 Determining the Exegetical Data

In order to begin at the ‘exegetical pole’ of the topic, we must address the essential task of determining which data this will include. Such an endeavour is at once both simple and complex. On the one hand, it involves surface-level analysis. We are concerned to ask which texts within the Pauline canon are relevant to the wider task at hand. This is simply a question of what’s in and what’s not; what are the parameters of the discussion from a textual point of view? Along such lines, the task here is to delineate which texts are of interest.

On the other hand, the manner in which the relevant texts are ascertained is far from simple. The most perplexing question concerns the issue of how we know which texts are about union with Christ and which are not. Clearly, the use of some notable phrases will automatically signal a text’s relevance. But how far does the concept permeate when such phrases are not extant? Which other phrases may be regarded as related to the topic? Which ideas and metaphors are connected to the concept of union?

The issue is more complicated than merely chasing down the phrase ‘in Christ’ and describing how it is used and what it means. That Paul may discuss the concepts raised by the phrase ‘in Christ’ without actually using the phrase in certain instances is a reasonable presupposition. Observation of the workings of human language demonstrates that we may speak of concepts and ideas through variegated expressions. Rarely, if ever, is the communication of a concept limited to one phrase or peculiar locution. Sophisticated language users may summon synonymous, parallel, symmetrical, analogous, metaphorical, and otherwise related means by which to speak of their chosen themes.4

As such, our endeavour to demarcate the texts of relevance to the theme of union with Christ is more complicated than it first appears. To find the theme, we must first know what the theme is. What is union with Christ? How are we to define this topic? What are the essential ingredients that establish the concept of interest? The problem here, of course, is that we cannot know what the theme is until we e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: Introductory Matters
• Part 2: Exegetical Study
• Part 3: Theological Study
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Author Index