10. Jesus the Lord
10
Jesus the Lord
Sharer of Other Divine Prerogatives
In this chapter we discuss a number of other instances throughout Paul’s letters where Christ “the Lord” shares a considerable variety of prerogatives that in the Jewish worldview belong exclusively to God. We begin with several instances where the risen Lord has assumed the role of Kyrios (“Lord” = Yahweh) and where he is thereby seen to have assumed the divine privileges inherent in the Septuagint text.
Christ, the Lord of Septuagint Texts
Boast in the Lord
1 CORINTHIANS 1:31
Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.”
JEREMIAH 9:24
“But let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the LORD [Yahweh], who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the LORD.
The language of boasting, either as a verb, verbal noun, or abstract noun, occurs fifty-nine times in the New Testament, fifty-five of them in Paul’s letters, and thirty-nine of these in the Corinthian letters alone—which suggests that Paul considered this a significant issue in the Corinthian church! Specifically, as the first matter addressed in the first of these letters, “division” in the “household” over their nonresident teachers or leaders, especially Apollos and Paul, was based primarily on the criterion of eloquence (1 Cor. 1:10–12). Significantly, and brilliantly, Paul does not take them on directly regarding the matter of boasting itself; he will come to that a bit later (2:6–16). Rather, he focuses first on the object of their boast. In so doing, he uses the language of boasting in his response to them not at all negatively but rather by drawing from an important moment in the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 9:23–24), of which Paul makes considerable use throughout an entire paragraph (1 Cor. 1:26–31).
That Paul is here intentionally making use of this passage from Jeremiah is evident from his preceding sentences (1 Cor. 1:26–28), where his categories for what people put their boast (= confidence) in are the “wise” and “influential [powerful]” and those “of noble birth”—an apparently ad hoc updating for the Corinthians’ sake of Jeremiah’s categories: “wisdom,” “strength,” and “riches” (Jer. 9:23).
Paul’s argument then concludes with the clause, “as it is written,” followed by a paraphrase of the Jeremiah text to address the issue at hand in Corinth: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:31). In Jeremiah, the Septuagint’s Kyrios glosses Adonai (= Yahweh), whereas for Paul the “Lord” in whom the Corinthians are to “boast” is Christ himself—a most remarkable reworking of the Jeremiah passage indeed, especially since their “boast” is now to be in the crucified one (cf. Phil. 3:3, 8, 10). Since the Septuagint is the only Bible these nascent believers, both Jew and Greek, would have known, there can be very little question as to where Paul was going with this somewhat gentle letdown of believers who had become altogether too high on themselves. It is now Christ the Lord, the crucified one, in whom alone they may—and indeed must—boast, where boasting is understood not as showing off but as putting one’s full confidence in something or someone.
1 CORINTHIANS 2:16
“Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
ISAIAH 40:13
Who can fathom the Spirit of the LORD, or instruct the LORD as his counselor?
From as early as in his first letter to the Corinthian believers, Paul has been arguing vigorously with them, almost certainly to their chagrin, that God’s true wisdom and power are to be found in a crucified Messiah (1 Cor. 1:18–2:5). The Apostle next feels the need to explain further (perhaps somewhat ironically to those confident of their Spirit-gifting) that the only way he and they can have this true wisdom is by revelation from the Spirit (2:6–16)—as is made abundantly clear later in the letter (chaps. 12–14). But in the present context, he concludes this part of his argument by citing Isaiah’s poignant question: “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” (2:16).
As in other instances, so too one might be led to read “the Lord” in this citation as referring to God the Father. But Paul offers his own interpretation, which disallows such a view. Here is yet another Old Testament Yahweh passage that is now to be understood in terms of Christ. “But we have the mind of Christ,” he concludes, thus interchanging “the LORD” (= Yahweh) of the Septuagint with “the Lord, Christ”—once again revealing his especially high Christology.
Beloved of the Lord
2 THESSALONIANS 2:13
But we ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters loved by the Lord, because God chose you as firstfruits.
DEUTERONOMY 33:12
About Benjamin he said: “Let the beloved of the LORD rest secure in him.”
In yet another truly remarkable moment of intertextuality, in his second thanksgiving in his second letter to the Thessalonians Paul addresses these believers as those “loved by the Lord.” This unique moment in the entire Pauline corpus can easily go unnoticed by modern readers (so much so that it fails even to make it as a marginal notation in the current NIV, which is otherwise especially up to speed on these matters). Nonetheless, what needs to be noted is that Paul’s language is precisely that of his Greek Bible, the Septuagint, from Moses’s blessing of the tribe of Benjamin: “Let the beloved of the LORD [= Yahweh] rest secure in him” (Deut. 33:12).
Thus in a moment of needed reassurance, those whom Paul had earlier described as loved by God (1 Thess. 1:4)—and will do so again in a follow-up moment (2 Thess. 2:16)—are here addressed in the language of Paul’s own Benjaminite family crest (see Phil. 3:5): beloved of the Lord. Even if the Thessalonians may not themselves have caught the reference, Paul is once again referring to Christ as their Lord, as he makes the interchange between God and Christ throughout this letter.
The Lord Be with You
2 THESSALONIANS 3:16
The Lord be with all of you.
RUTH 2:4
Boaz . . . greeted the harvesters, “The LORD [Yahweh] be with you!”
In one final, equally remarkable moment of intertextuality in the Thessalonian correspondence, Paul signs off his second letter to them with what appears to be an echo of the personal greeting that thrived among Yahwists in ancient Israel, “The LORD be with you.” In this case it is an echo from one of Paul’s Benjaminite predecessors (see Rom. 11:1). In the book of Ruth, we are told that Boaz greeted his workers, “The LORD be with you” (2:4; cf. the angelic greetings in Judg. 6:12 and Luke 1:28). This is another instance where Paul’s Kyrios (= Adonai/Yahweh) is applied to Christ—verified in this case not only by the surrounding matter but also by (a) the twofold identification of Christ as “Lord” in this letter in conjunction with Theos as Father (2 Thess. 1:2; 2:16) and (b) Paul’s consistent use of Kyrios to refer to Christ throughout his corpus.
Paul thus concludes his letter with this historic greeting as a prayer-wish that the exalted Lord would continue to be present with the believers in Thessalonica as Christ in his incarnation was with us when he came among us in our likeness in order to redeem. And, as we will discuss in the concluding chapter, Christ would be with them by the Spirit, who is at one and the same time known by Paul as the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ, as is made certain by his usage in his letter to the believers in Rome (Rom. 8:9–11).
The Lord Is Near
PHILIPPIANS 4:5
The Lord is near.
PSALM 145:18
The Lord is near to all who call on him.
In one of the more puzzling affirmations in his letters, Paul picks up David’s precise language from the Psalter as a means to encourage the believers in Philippi. The puzzle is twofold: first, whether it is a word about the present or an affirmation about the future, and, second, whether it goes with what precedes or follows. That is, does the Apostle intend, “Let your gentleness be evident to all [because] the Lord is near,” or, more likely in my view, “The Lord is near, [so] do not be anxious about anything” (Phil. 4:5–6)? In either case, this is yet another instance where Paul has adopted language about Yahweh from the Septuagint and applied it to Christ. The Apostle so lived and breathed the language of his Bible, as is evident everywhere in his letters, that he sometimes finds himself speaking in such an unusual manner as we find here!
Kyrios and Theos Share Prerogatives
In several instances in his letters, Paul interchanges a variety of divine attributes or activities between God (Theos) and the Lord (Kyrios). To be sure, not all of these are strictly divine prerogatives, but what is striking in each case is how easily and seemingly without deliberation Paul can make these interchanges. Rather than group or prioritize these passages, we simply list them below in their assumed chronological order. We deliberately limit our discussion to the first four letters in Paul’s corpus (1 and 2 Thessalonians and 1 and 2 Corinthians) since most everything after those letters would be repetition.
Christian Existence as Being in Christ/God
1 THESSALONIANS 1:1
To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord, Jesus Christ: Grace and peace to you.
The first mention of God and Christ together in the Pauline corpus appears in the very first line in Paul’s very first letter (1 Thess. 1:1; cf. 2 Thess. 1:1)—in this case as the double (grammatical) objects of a single prepositional phrase (“in God the Father and the Lord, Jesus Christ”). It is a phrase unlike any in Paul’s other letters. Here he designates the church of the Thessalonians as equally and simultaneously existing in God the Father and the Lord, Jesus Christ. In later letters he will frequently speak of believers as being “in Christ,” but here he speaks of them as also being “in God.”
The christological significance of this phrase is considerable indeed. For here is a significant twofold affirmation. First, God and Christ are together understood as the sphere in which believers exist; that is, they are simultaneously in God and in the Lord. And thus, second, to exist in God means at the same time to exist in Christ. It is not as though these believers lived in a twofold sphere of existence. Rather, for the Apostle to be “in Christ” means to be “in God” and vice versa—hence the reason Paul can later place them “in Christ” alone, because they are for him thereby automatically “in God” as well. Here, as the first thing the believers in Thessalonica will hear, is the affirmation that they exist simultaneously in both the Father and the Son.
How the Thessalonians might have heard this one can only guess, but we can be certain of what Paul intended by it because of the way he extrapolates these two realities in his later letter to the believers in Galatia (Gal. 4:4–7). Having made us “sons,” the same God who “sent his Son” likewise sent “the Spirit of his Son into our hearts.” We are thus able to use the Son’s own language and call God “Father,” whom we now address in Jesus’s native tongue, “Abba,” a diminutive that in English would mean something close to “dear Father.” What is striking indeed is the intimate familial ring of this language—and this from a Jewish man who grew up in a community that would never even mention the name of Yahweh, substituting “Lord” in its place for fear of speaking the name in vain!
The Grace of the Lord/God
The wish of “grace” for Paul’s churches is another place in his letters where the divine prerogatives are equally shared between God and Christ (the Lord), but in this case in an interesting variety of combinations. On the one hand, Paul’s letters almost all begin with the doublet “grace to you and peace,” and always in this order since the second flows out of the first. The source of this grace is invariably identified in turn: “from [both] God the Father and the Lord, Jesus Christ.” Paul’s own consistent usage—quite decisively it would seem, suggesting that he intends for his audience to hear it in this sequence—begins with “grace to you,” based on Christ’s redemptive love on the believers’ behalf, and concludes with the proper follow-up, “and peace.” Thus God’s initiating action on our behalf should result in “peace,” or what someone once described as a well-arranged heart.
On the other hand, most of the letters sign off with the singular benedictory prayer, “May the grace of the Lord [= Christ Jesus] be with you,” beginning with his first letter to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 5:28). Yet in the body of Paul’s letters grace is far more often expressed as coming from God the Father, with three notable exceptions where it is an attribute of Christ the Lord (2 Cor. 8:9; 12:9; 1 Tim. 1:14). This kind of interchange is not the result of a well thought-out theology but has become, by this point, simply a matter-of-fact kind of usage between Paul and his churches.
The Peace of the Lord/God—the Lord/God of Peace
The same interchangeability between Theos and Kyrios regarding “grace” is also true of its companion “peace,” which appears together with “grace” in all the salutations, and, as noted above, is always presented in the order “grace to you, and peace.” Elsewhere in the body of the letters there is again an interesting expression of interchangeability. On the one hand, the phrase “the peace of God” occurs only once in the corpus (Phil. 4:7), as does its counterpart, “the peace of the Lord” (2 Thess. 3:16). On the other hand, the descriptor, “the God of peace,” occurs six times. It occurs four times alone (1 Thess. 5:23; Rom. 15:33; 16:20; Phil. 4:9)—a form that is actually quite rare in the Old Testament. It further occurs once in the compound “God of love and peace” (2 Cor. 13:11), and is implied once in a contrast with “disorder” (1 Cor. 14:33).
In its second occurrence in the Thessalonian correspondence, Paul prays that “the Lord of peace” will “himself give you peace at all times” (2 Thess. 3:16). This line should be read as a prayer, and in this case it is a prayer offered to Christ alone—a striking feature that often goes unnoticed because of the casual, presuppositional way such interchange of language comes to us, which has also now become so commonplace.
Walk Worthy of the Lord/God
Another of these off-the-cuff, unintentional interchanges between “Lord” and “God” occurs in Paul’s appropriation of the Old Testament concept of “walking.” In the New Testament this is a consistent metaphor, taken over from the Old Testament, having to do with how a person lives before God and in the world. In his first letter to the believers in Thessalonica, the Apostle implores these new believers to walk worthy of the God who called them, even in the midst of present difficulties (1 Thess. 2:12). In a similar moment in a much later letter—this time by way of a prayer-report—he urges that the believers walk “worthy of the Lord,” which in context can refer only to Christ, so as to “please him in every way” (Col. 1:10).
As elsewhere this is an interchange that most later readers would scarcely notice, since either Christ or God fits well within one’s expectations when reading Paul’s letters. And that is precisely our reason for calling the reader’s attention to it here. This is illustrative of an assumed Christology of the highest order without intent on the Apostle’s part and yet expected by him to be shared by his readers or hearers.
The Divine Presence at the Parousia
Closely associated with Israel’s understanding of the divine glory in the Old Testament is the concept of God’s presence, as the interchange between these two ideas regarding the tabernacle and temple makes clear. Picking up the latter theme, Paul can speak interchangeably of being in the presence of the Lord or of God, depending on his point of emphasis at a given moment. Thus in his first mention of Christ’s parousia (“coming”), which appears in his earliest letter, Paul speaks of the Thessalonian believers as “our joy, . . . the crown in which we will glory” when together they will appear “in the presence of our Lord, Jesus, when he comes” (1 Thess. 2:19). A few sentences later, at the conclusion of his prayer (3:11–13), he speaks of being (literally) “in the presence of our God and Father at the parousia of our Lord, Jesus” (v. 13, my trans.). This is yet another instance of the interchange between “God” and “the Lord”—and these are the words of an ardent monotheist!
The Lord/God Who Strengthens Believers
In the same prayer just noted above, Paul continues by expressing his desire that “the Lord [= Christ] . . . strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy” (1 Thess. 3:12–13). Similarly, in his second letter to his friends in Thessalonica, he assures them that “the Lord . . . will strengthen you and protect you from the evil one” (2 Thess. 3:3). In between these two words of affirmation, however, he prays, “May our Lord, Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father . . . strengthen you” (2 Thess. 2:16–17). Just as he prays to both God the Father and Christ the exalted Lord, so he easily uses identical language for both the Father and the Son when mentioning the content of his prayer.
The phrase “the word of God” occurs seven times in the Pauline corpus (1 Cor. 14:36; 2 Cor. 2:17; 4:2; Rom. 9:6; Col. 1:25; Titus 2:5; 2 Tim. 2:9), always with what is technically known as a subjective genitive, so that “God” is the grammatical subject of the “word” that has been spoken, either in Scripture (what we know as the Old Testament) or with reference to the gospel in some way. Whereas in some cases the nature of the genitive in the phrase “the word of the Lord” is less easy to determine—whether it is about the Lord (objective) or from the Lord (subjective)—in its first appearance in the corpus (1 Thess. 1:8), “of the Lord” is most likely objective. In other words, what is spreading rapidly is “the word about the Lord,” referring to Christ.
This is likely also the case in its second occurrence, where Paul expresses desire for “the message of the Lord” to spread rapidly (2 Thess. 3:1). And there can be little question that, in its second appearance in his earlier letter, Paul is using “of the Lord” as a subjective genitive—that is, “the Lord” is the one who has spoken—in precisely the same way as with “the word of God”: “According to the Lord’s word, we tell you. . . .” (1 Thess. 4:15). This interchange is made certain by the follow-up of this phrase, which can refer only to Christ: “we who are still alive . . . until the coming of the Lord.”
The Faithfulness of the Lord/God
One of the more consistent ways Yahweh is self-revealed in the Old Testament is in a primary attribute of faithfulness, meaning essentially that God can be completely trusted at all times and in all ways to be whom God has revealed himself to be. It is therefore not surprising that, in his first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul should appeal to such faithfulness with regard to God carrying out divine purposes in the lives of these believers: “The one who calls you [referring to God] is faithful” (1 Thess. 5:24). The Apostle then says in his next letter to them: “But the Lord is faithful” (2 Thess. 3:3). In the immediate context, where two sentences earlier Christ has been specifically identified as “the Lord” (2 Thess. 2:16–17), it is clear that Paul is referring to Christ as “the Lord.” Thus even though elsewhere in his letters Paul speaks only of God’s faithfulness (1 Cor. 1:9; 10:13; 2 Cor. 1:18), here he applies that language to Christ as well.
The Gospel of Our Lord/God
When reading Paul’s letters one gets accustomed to the easy interchange between “the gospel of God” (1 Thess. 2:2, 8, 9), where the emphasis is on its source, and “the gospel of Christ” (1 Thess. 3:2), where the emphasis is on Christ as its basic content. However, in his second letter to these believers—in his long thanksgiving-turned-announcement of judgment against their persecutors with which the letter begins (2 Thess. 1:3–10)—Paul refers to the latter as “those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord, Jesus” (v. 8). This unique moment in the New Testament is shaped to fit the immediate context, since this phrase is but one more adaptation of common language to fit the setting of Christ carrying out God’s just judgment—in this case against those who are persecuting the Thessalonian believers. It is a remarkable adaptation of a common phrase, with the emphasis now on what the gospel has to do with the currently reigning Lord.
The Glory of the Lord/God
On several occasions in his letters Paul uses the phrase “the glory of God” as a way of speaking about the final goal of all things. The phrase is used to describe both the infinite greatness of God as such—for example, Paul’s instructions to believers to do all things with God’s glory in view (1 Cor. 10:31; Phil. 1:11)—and the sphere where God dwells (Rom. 5:2; Phil. 4:19). Paul uses both of these nuances of the phrase when speaking of Christ the Lord.
In Paul’s second letter to the believers in Thessalonica, he asserts that the final goal of salvation is obtaining “the glory of our Lord, Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 2:14)—that is, being together with him in the sphere of his glory. In his second letter to the Corinthian believers, he asserts that when believers turn to Christ by the Spirit they behold, or contemplate, “the Lord’s glory” (2 Cor. 3:18; cf. 4:4). The immediate context in this case makes plain that the Lord’s glory is that of Yahweh, glory that Moses had not been allowed to behold on Mount Sinai.
Paul Sent/Commissioned by Christ
In the Septuagint the Greek verb apostellō (“send”) is regularly used for Yahweh’s “sending,” or “commissioning,” messengers to the people who belong to God. This phenomenon explains why Paul can ask rhetorically, “How can anyone preach unless they are sent?” (Rom. 10:15), where he uses this verb, though without specifying the divine sender. But in an earlier letter when Paul speaks of his own ministry, he uses the same verb when he writes, “Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel” (1 Cor. 1:17). To be sure, in this instance “Christ,” not “the Lord,” is the grammatical subject of the verb; nonetheless, Paul clearly considered this sending to be part of his experience, which he relates later in the letter when he asks rhetorically, “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (9:1).
The Power of the Lord/God
One of the constants in the Old Testament understanding of God is that Yahweh is a God of great and unlimited power. Thus both creation and the redemption of Israel are regularly celebrated in the Psalter in terms of God’s great love and power (e.g., Pss. 89:5–18; 145:3–13). Paul uses this same kind of language in his letters as well. For example, he celebrates God’s power revealed in redemption and creation early on in his letter to the believers in Rome: “the gospel . . . is the power of God. . . . For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Rom. 1:16, 20).
Paul uses similar language with regard to the person and work of Christ. In the second matter he addresses in his first letter to the believers in Corinth—the difficult situation of the incestuous man (1 Cor. 5)—Paul begins by urging them in the context of the gathered assembly, when “the power of our Lord, Jesus, is present” (v. 4), to carry out the judgment that he has pronounced “in the name of our Lord, Jesus” (v. 3). Although “power” in this case is very likely an oblique reference to the Spirit, it is of christological import that God’s Spirit and power are understood to be present as the power of the exalted Lord, Jesus. Similarly, in his next letter to the Corinthian believers Paul reports Christ’s answer to his prayer concerning his “thorn in [the] flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7) that “my power is made perfect in weakness” (v. 9; cf. 1 Cor. 1:22–25). Thus Paul goes on to affirm that he would gladly bear such weaknesses “so that Christ’s power may rest on [him]” (2 Cor. 12:9).
The Lord/God Has Given
In the narrative of Israel’s creation of the tabernacle (Exod. 31:2–5; 36:1–2) we are told (in the Septuagint) that “God gave to [Bezalel]” the wisdom and skill for the task (36:1). In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians he uses this same language to refer to his own gifting for apostolic ministry: “God . . . through Christ . . . gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18). But in his earlier letter to them, Paul refers to his own and Apollos’s gifting as coming from the Lord: “as the Lord has given to each” (1 Cor. 3:5, my trans.).
The Lord/God Wills
Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians by noting that his apostleship is “by the will of God” (1 Cor. 1:1), a phrase that occurs some thirteen times in his letters. But in two remarkable moments in this same letter, Paul speaks of returning to Corinth “if the Lord is willing” (4:19) and “if the Lord permits” (16:7), thus seamlessly transferring this absolute prerogative of God to Christ the Lord.
Pleasing the Lord/God
In Paul’s discussion of what he perceives to be the advantages of singleness over marriage, he asserts that a single person is able to devote all of his or her energy to a single thing: how to “please the Lord” (1 Cor. 7:32). In most other such moments in his letters—both earlier (1 Thess. 2:15; 4:1) and later (e.g., Rom. 8:8; 12:1–2; 14:18; Phil. 4:18)—Paul speaks of “pleasing God.” Here is yet another Old Testament way of speaking (e.g., Ps. 19:14; Prov. 16:7) that has been taken over by Paul and directly applied to the Lord, Christ (cf. 2 Cor. 5:8–9).
The Assembly(ies) of Christ/God
In what is less a divine prerogative and more a matter of divine possession, Paul regularly refers to the believing communities with the term ekklēsia, a happy choice of terms since it does double duty: (1) it picks up the language for the local “assembly” of people in the Greek city-states, which (2) had been conveniently used by the Septuagint translators to speak of the gathered “congregation” of Israel. Paul’s genitive descriptor (used as a possessive) for this “assembly” is ordinarily “the assembly [or assemblies] of God,” but in signing off his letter to the believers in Rome he just as easily refers to the churches who are sending greetings to Rome as “the assemblies of Christ” (Rom. 16:16, my trans.).
The Fear of the Lord/LORD
The penultimate example of this kind of interchange between “God” and “the Lord” is one of the truly significant moments in the corpus. It is a sure indicator of the ease with which Paul transfers divine prerogatives and attributes to Christ and thus of Paul’s understanding of Christ as fully divine and as one who can regularly stand in a role that is biblically otherwise assigned to God alone. Although the phrase “the fear of the LORD” occurs most often in the Wisdom literature, it is basic to Israel’s understanding of Yahweh and of their relationship to the eternal One. Here the word “fear” seldom, if ever, carries its ordinary meaning in English, as having to do with being frightened. Rather, in almost every case it is a term denoting reverential awe, which is described in the Old Testament as “the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10).
Significantly, in a passage where Paul puts emphasis on Christ the Lord as the eschatological judge of his people (2 Cor. 5:10), he follows up by referring to knowing “what it is to fear the Lord,” by which he undoubtedly means Christ (v. 11). As with the usage of this phrase in Wisdom literature, here it refers not to their being fearful of Christ but to their being in reverential awe of him.
The Spirit of the Lord/God
This rehearsal of divine prerogatives shared by God and Christ the Lord is now brought to conclusion with the only one that does not occur in the first four of Paul’s preserved letters: that the one Holy Spirit, who is most often referred to as “the Spirit of God,” is on three occasions specifically identified by Paul as “the Spirit of Christ.” We will discuss this phenomenon in further detail in the concluding chapter, but here we make a few initial observations
When moving toward his instructions about the role of the Spirit in his letter to the Galatians, Paul stipulates that God “sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts” (Gal. 4:6), who elicits the Abba-cry. Similarly, in his later letter to the believers in Rome this interchange is specific and thoroughgoing. What identifies the believer as one who does not live “in the realm of the flesh” is that “the Spirit of God lives in you” (Rom. 8:9). But then Paul immediately makes the interchange: “And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ.”
Since for Paul there is also only “one Spirit” (Eph. 4:4; cf. 1 Cor. 12:4), this kind of interchange is a crowning expression of Paul’s understanding of the full deity of Christ. Along with other moments in his letters we have discussed, it serves as the basis for his triadic understanding of God that—along with the Gospel of John and Hebrews—eventually led the church to express this understanding in trinitarian terms. However one is finally to articulate the relationship between the one God and the one Lord, this kind of thing can be said by Paul only because he believes that the incarnate Son and now exalted Lord was eternally preexistent and fully equal with the Father. And this reality is what leads us to our concluding chapter. But before that we need to sum up the preceding discussion.
Conclusion
The evidence of this chapter puts the capstone on the high Christology in Paul that we have regularly observed in the preceding chapters. And it does so by way of the rich possibilities for Paul of the “title” for Jesus that had found expression in the earliest Aramaic-speaking communities, the confession that Jesus is “the Lord.” It is probably not accidental, therefore, that in its three appearances in Paul’s letters this confession always occurs in the order “the Lord is Jesus [Christ]” (1 Cor. 12:3; Rom. 10:9; Phil. 2:11; my trans.). Indeed, even though it was the earthly, incarnate Jesus who was raised from the dead, it was at Christ’s exaltation that God the Father bestowed on the preexistent Son the divine name of “the Lord” itself.
It was through the happy circumstance that the divine name had been translated in the Septuagint by way of the Aramaic Adonai (“the LORD” = Yahweh) that Paul was able to have it both ways. The preexistent Son, who became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, received the “name” at his vindication. But at the same time, by using ho Kyrios (“the Lord”) exclusively to refer to the risen Christ, the Apostle could include the Son in the divine identity in a complete way, but without absolute identification (merging the two into one) and without the Son usurping the role of God the Father.
Given the evidence that has been rehearsed in this chapter, we emphasize by way of conclusion two matters. First, one can hardly miss the rich variety of ways Paul has included Christ in the divine identity by means of the name-turned-title, ho Kyrios (“the Lord”). This phenomenon occurs repeatedly in the earliest letters in the corpus and is maintained throughout, all the way to his last letter, 2 Timothy. This phenomenon happens regularly in two ways: first, full sentences or paragraphs that refer to Yahweh and, second, in all sorts of shorter phrases that in the Old Testament are primarily the exclusive province of Yahweh but that in Paul’s writing, by means of the Septuagint, are regularly attributed to the exalted Lord, Jesus Christ.
Second, as we have noted repeatedly throughout the book, one can scarcely miss out on how theologically unselfconsciously and nearly offhandedly Paul transfers titles and prerogatives from Yahweh to Christ. Here is a man not trying to assert anything unusual about the role of the presently exalted Lord but who simply assumes it in every way in the process of dealing with all kinds of other matters in his churches. Perhaps even more significant is that he equally assumed that this understanding was shared by his readers, especially since this issue is never directly raised or responded to as such in any of his letters. This is clearly a matter of common ground between Paul and his letter recipients, on the basis of which he argues all kinds of other matters. But all throughout, his appropriation of Old Testament Yahweh language to refer to the divine activity of the reigning Lord, Jesus, has inherent in it an understanding of Christ as assuming roles that traditionally, and exclusively, belong to God alone.
Thus we conclude from the evidence that Paul offers as high a Christology as one could imagine. It is therefore not a matter of wonder that when the apostle John some years later chose to write a more reflective rendition of Christ’s incarnation and life of ministry, this way of understanding who Jesus was is expressed so boldly from the outset (John 1:1–18) and serves as the assumed common ground between him and his readers. As we will see in the concluding chapter, the early believers were practicing trinitarians, even if the necessary articulation of the trinitarian doctrine would come later, when the assumed realities expressed by all the writers of the documents that became our New Testament would need further articulation and clarification in the larger Roman world. By then the assumptions held in common at an earlier time would need elaboration and explanation for a gentile world not accustomed to the biblical framework of the writers and readers of these first-generation documents. And so the letters of Paul, along with the Gospel of John and Hebrews, were brought into the conversation to give expression to the trinitarian understanding of the one and only God. For whatever else was true for Paul, he was an absolutely thoroughgoing monotheist from start to finish. What is new is his devotion to Christ and his resulting way of speaking about Christ.
. Indeed, our closest English equivalent would be “Daddy,” but in English that carries too many other connotations that would not be true of “Abba” for us ever to so render it. This is a clear example where a diminutive in one language is simply not transferable to its equivalent in another language and is therefore not truly translatable.
. This is also why it is not quite precise when rendered (consistently in the English versions), “grace and peace to you.”