Jesus the Lord according to Paul the Apostle

A Concise Introduction

Fee, Gordon D.

• Editore: Baker Academic
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493414253
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Representing the fruit of a lifetime of study, this work from a revered evangelical scholar provides a concise summary of Paul's teaching about Jesus. Over the years, Gordon Fee has written and taught extensively on Paul's understanding of the person of Christ. In this handy volume, he offers the results of his exegetical work in a form accessible to any interested reader of Scripture. The book includes a foreword by Cherith Fee Nordling.

Part 1
The Savior

The primary goal of this study is to offer a careful analysis of the apostle Paul’s understanding of the person of Christ, that is, who it was who came among us and why he did so. I argue that Christ came among us for two basic reasons: first, to reveal the true nature and character of the eternal God and, second, to redeem us from our fallen, and thus broken, condition. But to get to those conclusions it seems wise to begin where Paul himself began: with what Christ did for us through his incarnation, including his life, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. The reason for beginning here is that what Christ accomplished by revelation and redemption (his work) is based altogether on who he was and is (his person). His work and his person are so tied together in Paul’s view that we can begin to understand his person by first examining his work. Parts 1 and 2, therefore, offer an overview of the Apostle’s understanding of Christ’s saving work—the doctrinal locus that theologians refer to as soteriology. Before turning in part 2 to Christ’s work as creator of a new humanity, in part 1 we focus on his work as Savior of humanity by examining how Paul views Jesus as both the divine Savior (chap. 1) and the preexistent and incarnate Savior (chap. 2).

1
The Divine Savior

The phrase salvation in Christ may well serve as the basic summation of Paul’s central concerns regarding both Christian experience and Christian theology. Paul unpacks his christological soteriology in four ways: through a consistent grammar of salvation; an eschatological framework for salvation; an identification of the people of God made in Christ’s image as the goal of salvation; and an identification of the death and resurrection of Christ as the means of salvation.

First, Paul uses a rather consistent grammar of salvation, which takes the following triadic form: salvation is predicated on the love of God the Father, effected through the death and resurrection of Christ the Son, and made effective through the Spirit of God, who is also the Spirit of the Son. Thus in the earliest passage of its kind in his preserved letters, Paul identifies the believers in Thessalonica in the following way: “brothers and sisters loved by the Lord [= Kyrios],1 because God chose you as firstfruits to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit” (2 Thess. 2:13; ca. 49 CE). This threefold way of speaking about our salvation continues throughout his letters to the very end: “God our Savior . . . saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom [God] poured out generously through Jesus Christ our Savior” (Titus 3:4–7; ca. 65 CE). Indeed, this triadic way of speaking about salvation, which resulted from the earliest believers’ experience of salvation, is the primary New Testament basis for the eventual articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity. It was formulated under Emperor Constantine during the fourth century when he called for a church council to address the issue of language about the Trinity. They drafted a document that eventually became one of the creeds of the church.2

One might note, for example, Paul’s rather off-the-cuff introduction to his response to the Corinthian believers regarding Spirit-gifting: “There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord [= Kyrios]. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work” (1 Cor. 12:1–3). Whatever language one uses for this divine triadic phenomenon, which eventually was given the designation of the Trinity, justice is done to Paul only when one recognizes that human salvation is grounded in and accomplished by the one and only God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Second, Paul’s soteriology employs a thoroughly eschatological framework, meaning that Christ’s death and resurrection and the gift of the Spirit mark the turning of the ages. Indeed, the consistent worldview of the several and varied writers of the documents that became our New Testament was that, with the coming of Christ, God has set in motion the new creation, in which all things will eventually be made new at the eschatological conclusion of the present age.

Third, for Paul the ultimate goal of human redemption is not simply saving individuals and fitting them for heaven, as it were—and as true as that may be—but is rather the creation of a people for God’s name, reconstituted by a new covenant.3 Although people in the new covenant are saved one by one, the ultimate goal of that salvation is the formation of a people who in their life together—as with Israel of old—reflect the character of the God who redeemed them. After all, the biblical narrative begins with humans purposely created in the divine image. For Paul the true eikōn, or image, of the eternal God was borne by Christ in his incarnation, and Christ in turn is in the process of re-creating a new people of God in his image through the work of the Spirit.

Fourth, for Paul the means of salvation is Jesus of Nazareth’s death on the cross and subsequent resurrection, which in turn was followed by the coming of the Holy Spirit to enable those of us who live in the present self-absorbed culture to live Christianly instead. Thus through what turned out to be the truly single great world-shaking event, the eternal God has chosen to redeem fallen humanity from their enslavement to self and sin so that death itself is thereby defeated. A careful reading of Paul reveals that all of his basic theological concerns are an outworking of his fundamental confession, found in one of his earliest letters that was written within two decades of the events themselves: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, [and] that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3–4; cf. Rom. 4:25). In a way that lies beyond all merely human imagination, we are told that Jesus was delivered over to death as an atonement for our sins and was raised to life for our justification, or redemption.

Although the first of these foundational propositions reflects the ultimate concern of this study, in this chapter we focus on these last two points: how Christ serves as both the goal and the means of salvation. Special attention is paid to Christ as the goal of salvation since this idea is seldom brought forward in discussions of Paul’s soteriology and since the role of Christ is not always as immediately obvious here as it is at other points.

The Goal of Salvation: Re-creation into the Divine Image

The People of God

One of the serious weaknesses of much traditional Protestant theology is its proclivity toward a doctrine of salvation (soteriology) devoid of a serious doctrine of the church (ecclesiology). That is, the tendency is to focus on salvation in an individualistic way that loses the “people of God” dimension of Paul’s perspective. This is due in large part to a presuppositional emphasis, especially in much Protestant theology, on discontinuity between the two covenants, with very little appreciation for the significant dimension of continuity. This presuppositional emphasis fails to recognize that such individualism is very much the product of modern Western civilization and that it scarcely, if at all, existed in the first century.

To be sure, the beginning point of discontinuity resides in the significant reality that entrance into the people of God under the new covenant happens individually, one by one, through faith in Christ Jesus and the enabling of the Spirit. As with all the New Testament documents, Paul’s letters in particular presuppose that they were written to first-generation believers who became so precisely in this way. Also of significance is that the churches to whom Paul is writing two decades into the Christian era were by then composed of more gentiles than Jews. How second-generation believers become members of the household of God is an area of huge debate and division among later Christians, in large part because these earliest believers could not have imagined that twenty centuries would follow them. The subsequent debate and division have happened in part because Paul, not to mention the rest of the New Testament, simply does not speak specifically to the matter of second-generation believers. Nonetheless, to embrace the “one at a time” reality to the neglect of the equally important “people of God” dimension of Christ’s saving work is surely to miss the Apostle by a great margin.

In this matter Paul is the product of two realities: his own personal history in the Jewish community and his divine appointment to be an apostle to the gentiles (Rom. 1:5; cf. Acts 9:15). Together these led him to presuppose that the goal of God’s saving work in Christ is to create an end-time people for God’s name out of Jews and gentiles together. Paul’s passion for such a people finds expression especially in his letters to the believers in Galatia and Rome. It is a primary driving concern in Ephesians as well, where the emphasis is more clearly on the church as a community of believers rather than on the salvation of individual believers as such. Indeed, in Ephesians the issue is not on justification by faith at all. The emphasis there is rather singularly on Jew and gentile together being re-created into one people of God, predicated on the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and realized by faith and the indwelling of the Spirit.

Similarly, the whole argument of Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome climaxes toward the end (15:5–13) with his affirmation as to what God’s coming in Christ was all about: “so that with one mind and one voice you [Jew and gentile together] may glorify the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ” (v. 6). This in turn is followed by a catena of four Old Testament passages (vv. 9–12) whose focus is altogether on the inclusion of the gentiles!

Paul’s letter to the believers in Galatia likewise concludes with a repetition of his aphorism, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything.” It is easy for us twenty centuries later to hear this as ho-hum, but it was anything but for any male Jew in the first century, for whom circumcision would have meant almost everything. But what does count, the Apostle continues, is “a new creation”—which for him meant Jew and gentile together, who are described collectively as “God’s Israel.” This aphorism made its initial appearance in Paul’s first preserved letter to the believers in Corinth,4 where it is followed by the line: “Keeping God’s commands is what counts” (1 Cor. 7:19)! One can only wonder how a fellow Jew in the community of believers in Corinth might have heard that. It is difficult for us who live in a much different culture, and at a much later time, even to come close to feeling or understanding what a total bombshell such an off-the-cuff statement like that would have been to its original recipients.

At the same time, a believer some twenty centuries later needs also to hear what Paul’s own context makes quite clear—that salvation based on faith in Christ Jesus assumes also that the believer is expected to live in a way that reflects the character of Christ Jesus, just as our Lord himself during his earthly life lived so as to exemplify God’s own character. To put it in more contemporary language, the whole purpose of Christ’s coming, and of our own salvation, is to re-create a people of God who—redeemed by the Savior Christ and endowed by the Holy Spirit—live out God’s original intent. It is to re-create a people who personally and corporately bear the divine likeness in their everyday lives and especially in their relationships with others.

Paul’s own calling is expressed in keeping with this concern: “God, who . . . called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1:15–16; cf. Rom. 15:15–19). Unfortunately, despite what Paul says so plainly, this sentence has often been misunderstood to mean God’s revelation to Paul, rather than God’s revelation in and through Paul’s life and calling as an example of God’s grace in this regard. When that key preposition (Gk. en) is inaccurately rendered “to” (which occurs in several popular English translations) this rendering quite misses Paul’s concern in making this affirmation. His clear point is that he, the Christ hater, was not simply a recipient of that revelation but is himself Exhibit A of God’s amazing grace. Thus Paul expresses his self-understanding by echoing language from the prophet Isaiah, who had envisioned the inclusion of the gentiles in the “last days” people of God. This vision of inclusion, which stands at the very beginning of Isaiah (2:2–5), finds expression several times thereafter (11:10; 42:6; 49:6).

Since Isaiah 46:6 and 49:6 appear in Isaiah’s so-called Servant Songs, it is not surprising that Paul sees a passage at the beginning of the final Servant Song (54:1) as fulfilled by gentile inclusion (Gal. 4:27), an inclusion found several times elsewhere in the prophetic tradition (Mic. 4:1–2; Zeph. 3:9; Zech. 8:20–22; 14:16–19). This prophetic vision, in turn, takes us back to God’s original covenant with Abraham: “I will make you into a great nation . . . and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12:2–3). Israel’s failure in this regard is what is picked up as belonging to the end times by some of the prophets—a tradition to which Paul seems thoroughly indebted.

Luke’s version of this calling is given in his account of Paul’s final speech in Acts: “I am sending you to the [gentiles] to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me” (Acts 26:17–18). Although the language is Luke’s, the content is fully that of the Apostle and is thus basic to the early believers’ understanding of their own role in the great new reality that God was bringing forth. It would take a man like Paul to recognize that by the Spirit God himself had now bridged the gap between Jew and gentile!

Paul’s language for the people of God, which now (especially) includes gentiles, is simply an extension of the language of the former covenant. The most common term Paul uses is hagioi, “holy ones,” which in earlier English versions was rendered “saints.” This language was borrowed directly from the book of Daniel (7:18, 22), which itself was an echo of a primary moment in Israel’s own history: “Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod. 19:5–6, hagios in the Septuagint).

For those of us reading the English Bible at a later time, however, that rendering has evolved to mean something considerably different from its origins. The word “saint” has become a term used almost exclusively for those who are esteemed as especially “holy.” As a result we have become accustomed to hearing about “Saint Paul” or “Saint John,” but no one under any circumstances would ever refer to the author of this book as “Saint Gordon”! In contrast, for Paul this was standard language for all of Christ’s people and not just for a special few.

Crucial to this usage for Paul was the promise that “the holy ones” would eventually include “all nations...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: The Savior
• Part 2: The Second Adam
• Part 3: The Jewish Messiah and Son of God
• Part 4: The Jewish Messiah and Exalted Lord
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Back Cover