1. The Divine Savior
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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], 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.
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. 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, 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 and peoples of every language” (Dan. 7:14). Unfortunately, as noted above, this way of referring to the “congregations of the Lord’s people” (1 Cor. 14:33), which included all believers in a given locale, has evolved in English to refer to an exclusive group of believers who are considered to be particularly noteworthy for both their sanctity and their service in behalf of Christ. But the biblical usage must win out. Only as all of those who belong to Christ live in ways in keeping with their Lord himself will the world listen to our gospel.
The same sense of continuity between the Old and New Testaments, between the earlier and present people of God, is found in Paul’s usage of the Greek noun ekklēsia (lit. “assembly,” but most often rendered “church” in English versions). This word also had the advantage of being well known in the Greek world for any gathering of people for a common purpose. In Paul’s usage, however, the word was first of all determined by its appearance in the Greek translation of the Old Testament (LXX) as a rendering of the Hebrew word qahal. This word was consistently used to refer to the congregation of Israel and had to do with the “gathering together” of God’s people. It was frequently used, for example, to refer to the assembling of God’s people at Mount Sinai.
Thus for Paul there was a happy linguistic coincidence between qahal and ekklēsia that served as a useful way to tie together the two covenants. This is why the rendering of this word into today’s English as “church” is so unfortunate, since for the vast majority of people whose first language is English the word “church” most often connotes a building—a meaning that did not exist at all in Paul’s time—rather than a community of believers gathered together for worship and fellowship. Indeed, the phrase “going to church” is one of the near travesties of contemporary Protestantism, since we use the same language for “going to” school, “going to” a sporting event, or even “going for” a walk in the park. Rather, Paul’s language is meant to encourage us to “assemble” as a church, so as to worship God and Christ as well as to be in fellowship with others.
A similar continuity between Old and New can be found in Paul’s use of the terms “election” and “new covenant,” both of which occur several times in his various letters. The term “election” appears in both early (1 Thess. 1:4; 2 Thess. 2:12) and later (Col. 3:12; Eph. 1:4, 11) letters and is always a reference to believers, either locally or universally, where the emphasis is simply that God called us to become part of the family of believers. Likewise, the term “new covenant” occurs both early (1 Cor. 11:25; 2 Cor. 3:6–17) and later (Gal. 4:24; Rom. 2:29), in each case echoing a crucial moment in Deuteronomy: “The LORD [= Yahweh] your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live” (30:6).
Equally telling is Paul’s use of temple imagery for the people of God in a given location (1 Cor. 3:16–17; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:20). This imagery picks up the especially important “presence of God” motif from the Old Testament, which in Galatians 3:28 is explicitly applied to the reality of Jew and gentile together as identifying the one newly formed people of God across three major lines of division: gender (male/female), ethnicity (Jew/gentile), and social status (slave/free). To be sure, Paul did not attack the divisions in social status as such; for him at this moment in history that was simply a given. His singular passion throughout was for a community of believers—each one of whom would be some combination of the three identity markers—that their life together would reveal God’s character and love for the world.
The Apostle’s concern with regard to the people of God is also found in other ways throughout his letters. For example, it is of more than passing interest that most of his letters to churches are addressed to whole congregations, not to a leader or leaders. Indeed, even when leaders are included in the salutation (as in Phil. 1:1), they are so as an addendum: “together with the overseers and deacons.” Likewise, when a problem in the church is the direct result of a single individual’s wrongdoings, Paul never addresses the wrongdoer directly, and he seldom identifies him or her by name. Rather he calls on the whole church, not just the leaders, to deal with the issue as a community matter. This is especially so in his dealing with the cases of incest and lawsuits in the believing community in Corinth (1 Cor. 5:1–13; 6:1–12). At issue in each of these instances is primarily the community as God’s newly formed people in Corinth.
Regarding the case of incest, Paul writes, “when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of the Lord, Jesus, is present, hand this man over to Satan” (1 Cor. 5:4–5); “get rid of the old yeast so that you may be a new unleavened batch of dough” (v. 7); and finally, “expel the wicked person from among you” (v. 13, using language from Deuteronomy). This sense of corporate social responsibility, which is so often lacking in modern times, lies at the very heart of Paul’s understanding of what it means to be the people of God. Especially noteworthy is that this was to be a community action, not that of a select group of people in leadership.
The same is true again in the next matter taken up, that of the collective believers’ own failure to take on community responsibility when one of their number had brought another brother to court “before the ungodly” (1 Cor. 6:1–6). This kind of action did not take place in a courthouse behind closed doors but would have happened in the Corinthian agora, the central “marketplace,” and thus in the presence of the whole city, as it were. Paul is incensed and astonished that one of their number felt that to get justice he needed to go to the Roman courts, good as they might have been (and often were in general). “Is it actually possible,” he chides, “that there is no one capable of handling such a matter internally” (v. 5) among those who, as followers of the crucified and risen one, should have had a different view of the world and justice?
In this case, Paul finally speaks to the two litigants (in vv. 7–8 and 9–10, respectively), but his primary focus is on what the lawsuit has meant as a failure for the whole community. To be sure, the individual offenders are to be dealt with, but only when the believing community has gathered for worship—that is, in the place where the Spirit of the living God has especially chosen to dwell on earth. In the end, the shame fell on both the one who did the wrong in the first place and the one who, when wronged, chose to redress his grievances outside the community of faith. But for Paul the shame was especially on the community as a whole, among whom the Spirit of the living God had chosen to dwell, but whose actions in so many different ways had become the exact opposite of Christlikeness. Indeed, the community’s actions were all too often precisely in keeping with what Paul frequently refers to as “the world” (1 Cor. 1:20–21, 27; 3:19; 6:2; 2 Cor. 10:2–4).
In sum, for Paul salvation in Christ has the creation of a people for God’s name as its goal, and this concern is especially to be seen in continuity with the people of God as constituted by the former covenant. The eternal God has come to earth as one of us, as the only and finally effective way of re-creating a people for God’s name. In Paul’s letters this newly formed people are to bear God’s character and likeness, both in their individual lives and especially in their common life together in the midst of a fallen and broken world. Our lives as followers of Jesus would be far more faithful and robust if we understood and appreciated the Apostle’s passion in these matters and their implications for our own contexts. Unfortunately, rather serious misunderstandings of Paul’s concerns have led many to become immune to the radicality of his passions, both for his own churches and for the church today. May we walk more in step with the Spirit, sharing Paul’s passions and concerns, to be further conformed to our Lord Jesus Christ as God’s people.
A New Creation
Another facet of Paul’s soteriology can be seen in his use of “new creation” terminology to speak of the result of God’s saving event in Christ. Paul expresses this idea not only in terms of “new creation” explicitly but also with his usage of “image of God” and “second Adam” language with regard to Christ. So important is this aspect of Pauline soteriology—especially as it relates to his Christology—that I devote the bulk of chapter 3 to unpacking it. But here I make a few preliminary observations about this language as it pertains to Paul’s soteriology in particular.
According to Paul’s new creation theology, the death and resurrection of Christ have set in motion a radical, new-order point of view—resurrection life marked by the cross, as Paul explains in the key “new creation” passage in his second letter to the believers in Corinth (2 Cor. 5:14–21). This new viewpoint lies at the heart of everything Paul thinks and does (cf. Phil. 3:4–14), which in turn leads to a series of passages in which Paul picks up “second exodus” imagery from Isaiah 40–66. The eternal God, the prophet proclaims, is about to do a “new thing” (Isa. 43:18–19) and in the end will establish “new heavens and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17; 66:22–23).
In Paul’s letters this theme is applied to believers, who through association with Christ’s death and resurrection have experienced a form of death and resurrection to newness of life. The theme is expressed in diverse passages, both early and late (Rom. 6:1–14; 7:4–6; Col. 3:1–11; Eph. 4:20–24). Common to these presentations—either explicitly (Rom. 6:1–14) or implicitly (e.g., cf. Col. 2:9–12 with 3:1–11)—is an association with Christian baptism, the key point of entry into the believing community, where “burial” in water symbolizes death to the old and rising to live anew in the world by the power of the Spirit.
In this regard the passage in Colossians is especially noteworthy, since it concludes: “Here there is no Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Col. 3:11; cf. Gal. 3:28). In the new order already set in motion through Christ’s death and resurrection, the value-based distinctions between people—ethnicity, status, and gender—are no longer maintained; all are together sisters and brothers in the same family of God. It is a tragedy that those who consider themselves children of the same heavenly Father, and thus followers of the crucified one, seldom seem genuinely to have caught on to the Apostle’s own passions at this point.
In addition to this explicit new-creation language, Paul’s use of “image of God” language echoes the primary divine announcement about humankind that appears at the very beginning of the biblical narrative (Gen. 1:26–27). Since God’s image-bearers are to be the divinely appointed vice regents in charge of the creation, there is reason to believe that behind this usage is a common feature of suzerainty in the ancient Near East. One way for a suzerain, or sovereign, to remind subject peoples of his sovereignty was by placing images of himself throughout the land as visual reminders of that sovereignty. Thus God expresses his own sovereignty over creation by placing it under those who bear the divine image, man and woman together, created so as to show forth the divine image in their own relationships with one another. What was distorted in the fall was the image of God in humanity; this is precisely where, in Paul’s theology, Christ enters history as the one who is bringing about the new creation, restoring the image.
Our Savior is thus the second Adam, the one who, first of all, in his humanity is the perfect image-bearer of the eternal God (2 Cor. 4:4; Col. 1:15). At the same time he is the one who restores that image in fallen humanity, that is, in those who believe and thus “walk by the Spirit” (Gal. 5:16). In turn the Spirit empowers those who are born anew to live and behave so as also to reflect the divine image.
In saving a people for God’s name, Christ is also described as ton prōtokon, “the firstborn among many brothers and sisters,” who have themselves been predestined to be “conformed into the image of [God’s] Son” (Rom. 8:29; cf. Col. 2:10–11). Indeed, as Paul writes elsewhere, it is as though by the Spirit that God’s people are looking into a mirror and beholding not their own image but Christ’s and are thus being transformed into that same image, from glory to glory, which means either from present to final glory or from one measure of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:17–18). By the Spirit Christ effects the new creation by restoring humanity back into the divine image.
This divine goal of (re-)creating a people who bear God’s image—both individually and collectively—is precisely why Paul instructs believers that, rather than be under the law, they are to “walk by [or in] the Spirit” (Gal. 5:16), and therefore why so much in Paul’s extant letters deals with ethical or behavioral matters. As Galatians 5 and Romans 12–14 make abundantly clear, salvation in Christ involves behavior on the part of the redeemed ones that reflects God’s own character; otherwise for Paul there has been no salvation at all. Indeed, this is the genuinely biblical sense of the old adage, “like Father, like child.”
The unfortunate lack of this behavioral dimension of Pauline soteriology—understandably downplayed because of the role of “works” in certain theologies—has been a theological weakness in historical Protestantism. That is, fear of “works” leading to salvation has sometimes resulted in a separation of salvation and ethics. This misses Paul’s emphasis on behavior as a matter of being conformed into the image of Christ by the Spirit, having been saved from sin for new creation life. This is not to raise the specter of “works,” but it is to note that we are all called to conformity into God’s own likeness. Thus Paul’s longing for the Galatians is for “Christ [to be] formed in you” (4:19), which in Romans takes the form of an admonition to “clothe yourselves with the Lord, Jesus Christ” (13:14). For Paul, Christlikeness, or restoration into the divine image, is the primary present goal of Christ’s “saving work” on our behalf—itself the ultimate restoration of what was lost in Eden.
In the Apostle’s theology, therefore, Christ’s saving work is both (re-)creating a people for God’s name and, at the same time, forming this people to be part of the new creation. Crucial to this understanding of salvation in Christ is that God’s newly formed people—both individually and collectively—are to love and serve as God’s image-bearers on earth. And this likely is also why Paul’s energies seem to be so often (sometimes overwhelmingly so) given to exhorting and encouraging his congregations to live out this calling as God’s people wherever they are.
Presupposed in all the Apostle’s soteriological talk, as we will see in chapter 2, is both the preexistence and the incarnation of the Son, whose own beginnings were not when he was “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4). Rather, he was and is eternally the Son, whom the Father sent into the world, both to bear the divine image and to restore that image in God’s people as they relate to one another, other people, and the rest of creation. Indeed, it is precisely here that Christology and soteriology intersect in Paul’s thinking.
The Place of Christ Devotion in Pauline Theology
This intersection of who Christ is with what Christ did (Christology and soteriology) helps to explain one of the best known, but seldom reflected on, realities in the Pauline corpus: that this rigorous monotheist had become such a devoted follower and worshiper of Christ the Son. This Christ devotion in Paul takes two forms: (1) personal devotion to Christ himself and (2) communal devotion expressed through worship of Christ as Lord. Both of these forms of devotion are full of christological presuppositions.
Christ as the Recipient of Personal Devotion
Having grown up in a devout Diaspora home, Paul would have known by rote the primary commandment for all Israel: “You shall love the LORD [= Yahweh] your God with all your heart.” It is therefore interesting that this kind of language occurs only three times in Paul’s letters: twice Paul speaks of “those who love” God (1 Cor. 2:9; Rom. 8:28), and in his benediction that concludes the letter to the Ephesians, he extends grace to “all who love our Lord, Jesus Christ” (Eph. 6:24). Despite the paucity of this precise language, the kind of devotion to God the Father that is embraced in this primary commandment is generally given over to Christ the Son in Paul’s letters. This finds expression in a variety of ways in his letters, especially whenever he writes longingly of his own and his fellow believers’ eschatological future.
It seems that after the Apostle’s encounter with the risen Lord, his worldview became thoroughly christocentric, as is demonstrated in the terminology he uses in his letters. In the ten letters in the church corpus, God is mentioned considerably more often than Christ in Romans and slightly more often in 2 Thessalonians and 2 Corinthians; overall Christ is mentioned sixty-three more times than God (599/536), and this appears to be by design. Perhaps most striking with regard to this phenomenon is the way the Apostle can so freely interchange the nouns Theos (God) and Christos (Christ) in a variety of ways when speaking about divine activities.
This Christ devotion is a rather striking feature in light of Paul’s otherwise rather consistent grammar of salvation expressed most notably in one of his early letters (1 Cor. 8:6). Here Paul had reworked the Jewish Shema to include Christ, so that the “one God” (the source and goal of all things) is the Father, and the “one LORD” (Yahweh, who is the divine agent of all things) is Christ Jesus. And, significantly, in Paul’s worldview both the source and goal of all things and the divine agent of all things are to be worshiped as one.
In Paul’s radically changed worldview following his encounter with the risen Lord, therefore, almost everything is done in relation to Christ. The believing communities exist “in Christ,” and everything believers are and do is “for Christ,” “by Christ,” “through Christ,” and “for the sake of Christ.” And these more generalized expressions of life totally devoted to Christ also at times find more specific expression. Take, for example, the Apostle’s argument with the Corinthians as to the advantages of the single life. Such people are “concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how they can please the Lord,” and their “aim is to be devoted to the Lord in both body and spirit” (1 Cor. 7:32, 34). Indeed, being single allows one the best of all options: “to live in a right way in undivided devotion to the Lord” (v. 35). It is not difficult to hear Paul speaking personally here, even though he presents this as a viable option for the unmarried in Corinth. In our fascination with the matter of marriage and singleness, the christological focus of his argument should not be passed over, for at the center of all such instruction and admonition is “the Lord” (= Christ Jesus).
Similarly, where the Old Testament precedent had put emphasis on Israel “knowing God,” this kind of language appears in Paul only with relation to Christ. This is especially so in Philippians, where the kind of longing that Paul has for these friends is placed “in the bowels [= affection] of Christ Jesus” (1:8). When he goes on to tell his own story as a model of a cruciform life (3:4–14), he echoes an especially crucial Yahweh moment from the prophet Jeremiah: “Let the one who boasts, boast about this: ‘that they have understanding to know me, that I am the LORD’” (Jer. 9:24). Paul claims that the Lord in whom he boasts is Christ Jesus. Indeed, he continues: “I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8). Here the identification of “the Lord,” which in Jeremiah refers to Yahweh, is transferred completely to Christ. The christological significance of this can scarcely be gainsaid, since these words are written by one whose religious heritage includes the Psalter, where this kind of devotion is offered exclusively to Yahweh. In Paul such devotion to God is expressed primarily for Christ, in the sense that it appears this way in his letters more frequently than otherwise. As such passages indicate, Paul acts and talks like a trinitarian well before that language had become a part of the believers’ vocabulary.
Paul’s longing for the arrival of God’s eschatological future is best understood in light of such Christ devotion. In Paul’s letters this longing finds expression exclusively in terms of being “with Christ” and never expressly as being “with God,” although one may well assume that such an understanding is inherent in his longing for Christ. This phenomenon begins in his earliest letters. He writes to the Thessalonians: “we wait for his Son from heaven” so that “we may live with him,” whom “we will be with forever” (1 Thess. 1:10; 5:10; 4:17). Likewise, in his next letter to them he writes of “our being gathered to him” (2 Thess. 2:1). In his second letter to the Corinthians, he writes that the “eternal glory that outweighs” present suffering is expressed in terms of “being away from the body [in its present suffering] and at home with the Lord [with a body ‘overclothed’ for eternity]” (2 Cor. 4:17; 5:8). And in one of his latest letters, Paul writes of his desire to “depart and be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23). Thus Paul’s Christ devotion can be seen from beginning to end.
Again, Paul writes nothing similar about being with God the Father. It is thus hardly surprising that one of the later expressions of the standard benediction with which Paul’s letters conclude takes the form, “Grace to all who love our Lord, Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:24). While such an expression seems natural enough to those of us who have been raised on the Christian Scriptures and frequently worship in Christian churches, it is striking when read in its original context. Here is a thoroughgoing monotheist, raised in a context that was absolutely God-centered, who now turns the larger part of his own personal devotion to the Lord, Jesus Christ.
That Paul seems to simply assume such a Christology in his personal devotion is significant—as significant, if not more so, than his explicitly christological affirmations. It would be one thing if Paul were trying to establish or argue for such a point of view, but instead it is from this reality—assumed by both Paul and his converts—that he argues for every kind of virtue in a life lived in obedience to Christ. Christology can scarcely get higher than this!
Christ as the Object of Community Worship
Christ devotion as direct worship takes several forms in Paul’s letters, probably as the direct result of the early believers’ devotion to the risen Christ, which itself likely began around the meal eaten in honor of Christ. Indeed, on one occasion the Apostle refers to this meal as the “Lord’s table” (1 Cor. 10:21). We now look in more detail at three expressions of such devotion that have christological implications: celebrating at the Lord’s table, singing hymns to and about Christ, and addressing prayers to Christ.
The Lord’s Table
The central role that the Lord’s table assumed in the early church is a most remarkable christological innovation. Interestingly, it is something we know about in the Pauline churches only because of a Corinthian abuse. In the entire corpus of Paul’s preserved letters, it is mentioned or alluded to only in Paul’s first letter to Corinth—and there no less than four times (1 Cor. 10:3–4, 16–17; 11:17–34; 5:8).
In 1 Corinthians 10:3–4, Paul alludes to the Christian table by way of an analogy with the food and drink divinely supplied to Israel in the desert. This analogy is almost certainly expressed in anticipation of what Paul will say a bit later (10:16–17), where he speaks of the Lord’s table as the exclusively Christian meal, which thereby forbids attendance at the meals in the idol/demon temples. Israel, Paul points out, had its own form of divinely supplied food and drink, yet that did not “secure” them with God, and because of their idolatries, the vast majority of them were “scattered in the wilderness” (10:3–10). In the process of this argument Paul eventually interprets the bread as having to do with the church—“we who are many”—as Christ’s body (v. 17). In so doing he anticipates the issue of unity and diversity, which he will address later in the letter (chaps. 12–14). All of this puts the focus of the Christian meal squarely on the Lord, Jesus Christ.
But most subsequent interest in what Paul says about what came to be called the Eucharist (Greek for “thanksgiving”) has focused on the issue and remedy that he speaks to in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34, where apparently the more well-to-do were abusing those who were poorer by turning the table celebration into their own private meal that excluded “those who have nothing.” To correct this abuse Paul reminds them of the words of institution, which are nearly identical to those found in Luke’s Gospel. What is especially significant about this passage for our present christological interests is that there can be little question that the meal described is the Christian version of a meal in honor of a deity. We can observe this in four ways from this passage.
First, Paul’s language for the meal in this instance is “the Lord’s Supper” (1 Cor. 11:20), language that occurs only here in the New Testament. This is likely a Pauline construct deliberately chosen in contrast to what Paul goes on to call “your own private suppers.” Almost certainly this refers to those who were better off financially and socially than many of the other believers. Of special interest for our purposes is the word Paul uses to refer to Christ, the adjective kyriakon, which can mean either “pertaining to” (“in honor of”) or “belonging to” the Lord, meaning that it is his own specifically instituted meal. But in either case Paul’s own language puts the emphasis on the fact that this meal uniquely has to do with “the Lord,” in whose name and honor it is eaten. Thus, as with the Passover in Israel, which this meal is modeled after, this is the only singularly Christian meal, and the focus and honor now belongs to the “Lord” (Jesus) rather than to God the Father.
Second, this meal was instituted by Christ in the context of a Passover meal, as Paul expresses in two ways. First, in 1 Corinthians 5:7–8 in his discussion of the case of incest in the church, he asserts, “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness” (and thus without the incestuous man present). Such language can only be an allusion to the Lord’s table and thus to Paul’s understanding of the connection between what Christ did and the Christian celebration of their own feast. Also, in 1 Corinthians 11:23, Paul uses the introductory phrase, “on the night he was betrayed,” an allusion to Jesus’s institution of this meal in the context of the Passover.
Paul’s concern seems clear: that in the Christian community the Passover meal formerly eaten annually in honor of Yahweh, and in remembrance of the deliverance of his people from Egypt, is now eaten regularly (probably weekly) and exclusively in honor of Christ as the Christian deity, and thus in remembrance of his delivering his people from bondage to Satan. Again, it is nearly impossible to imagine a Christology higher than this!
Third, in the earlier reference to the meal (1 Cor. 10), Paul deliberately set the meal in honor of the Lord as the Christian alternative to the pagan temple meals, which some of the Corinthians were insisting on attending since, according to the Shema, there is only one true God. Apparently in their view, the pagan meals, even though in honor of a deity, were not in reality in honor of a deity since the “god” did not actually exist. To be sure, Paul grants them that there is only one true God; nonetheless, he identifies the “deities” as demons (v. 20), thus acknowledging their reality.
In so doing Paul is clearly setting out the Lord’s table as the Christian alternative to these pagan meals; at the same time he also assumes that Christ is the Christian deity who is honored at his meal. It would be simply unthinkable to have such a meal in honor of a mere human who sacrificed himself on behalf of others and who was therefore highly honored by God through resurrection. Indeed, these offhand comments that reveal Paul’s presuppositions are probably the most telling evidence not only that Paul holds a high Christology himself but also that he assumes it is shared by the believing communities that he has founded—and this within two decades of the cross and resurrection!
Fourth, the remainder of Paul’s corrective puts the Corinthian abuse in the strongest possible christological framework. Abuse of the Lord’s body (= the church) at the Lord’s table has resulted in divine punishment. Significantly, these sentences also make plain that the present judgments are to be understood as coming from the deity who is being dishonored, namely, “the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:32), Jesus Christ. The net result is that a meal in honor of the Lord calls for the Lord’s judgment on those who would abuse his people—who corporately bear the divine eikōn, or image—at his table.
From Paul’s Jewish worldview, the prerogative to judge belongs to God alone. Again, all of this is in place as the assumed common ground between the Apostle and these believers, which so incontrovertibly reveals Paul’s thoroughgoing theological understanding of Christ. Thus everything about Paul’s discussion of the Lord’s table either assumes or asserts the highest kind of Christology in relationship to Christ as divine Savior.
Singing Hymns to Christ
As in his discussion of the Lord’s Supper, Paul almost incidentally reminds the believers in Colossae that singing hymns in Christian worship has the message about Christ as its primary focus: “Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts” (Col. 3:16). Thus singing lay at the heart of Christian worship from the very beginning, and such singing is full of assumed Christology. Hymns like those preserved in the Psalter that were both “to” and “about” Yahweh are now sung (apparently exclusively) to and about Christ Jesus.
In Colossians 3:16 the primary concern of the exhortation is with the “message of Christ,” that is, the message of the gospel with its central focus on Christ. As with the Jewish Psalter, so with the believers in Colossae: what is most truly believed about Christ is regularly reaffirmed through singing hymns to him or in his name. Thus the concern in these affirmations is not on Christ speaking to them as they gather—although that too could happen through prophetic utterance—or with his teachings; rather, as Paul declares at the outset of the letter, his primary concern is the message of the gospel with its total focus on Christ. Indeed, this is what the letter is all about: Christ as the creator, the redeemer, and the embodiment of God. Paul now urges that this “message of Christ”—which in part he had articulated in 1:15–23—“dwell among you” in an abundant way. In so doing, part of the believers’ activity will be directed toward one another (“teach[ing] and admonish[ing] one another”), and part toward God (“singing to God with gratitude in your hearts”). Thus the gospel is to be present among them “richly.” The structure of 3:16 as a whole indicates that songs of all kinds—with Christ now as their focus and content—are to play a significant role in that richness.
Significantly, it is likely, as most scholars now assume, that Paul’s earlier words about Christ in this letter (1:15–18), which focus on our Savior and his work, reflect an early Christian hymn. If so, that would explain why Paul thinks of these various kinds of hymns and Spirit songs as a way the believers can “teach and admonish one another.” Such songs are by their very nature creedal, full of theological grist, and thus give evidence of what the early Christians most truly believed about both God and Christ.
In the twin passage in Ephesians 5:18–19, the exhortation turns to singing hymns to Christ. The background to the two-dimensional worship expressed here and assumed in the Colossians passage—hymns that are at once directed toward the deity and didactic for the participants—is found in the Jewish Psalter. There we find dozens of examples of hymns addressed to God in the second person, which also have sections in the third person extolling the greatness or faithfulness of God for the sake of those singing to God. The use of hymns in the New Testament indicates how much they function for the early church in this two-dimensional way. In the Pauline churches in particular, Christ often assumes the dual role of being sung to and sung about. Again, the seemingly incidental or unselfconscious way that Paul transfers the Psalter’s pattern to Christian hymns further supports the view that devotion previously given exclusively to Yahweh has for the early Christians transferred to Christ as “Lord”—to the one who came to earth to both redeem and re-create us into the divine image.
In sum, as with the Lord’s table, worship in the form of singing focuses on Christ as the centerpiece. The singing contains the message about Christ and is at times sung to Christ as well. Such worship as this includes Christ as divine, while always maintaining unwavering monotheism. Once again, such presuppositional high Christology is often more telling than explicit christological statements.
Prayer
The third form of the worship of Christ the Savior as Lord comes in the form of prayer directed toward Christ in precisely the same ways that prayer is also directed toward God the Father. This pattern appears in the first two letters in the Pauline corpus, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and continues right to the end (for those who consider 1 and 2 Timothy as the end of the Pauline corpus).
The evidence for this is writ large throughout the thirteen Pauline letters and covers most kinds of prayer, although some scholars have played down the role of Christ in prayer, which can only be done by sidestepping the considerable evidence to the contrary. Had Christ not been included as the object in these passages, then all would see them as true prayers addressed to God. But because Christ is the object in these passages, some scholars have argued that we should not read them as prayers. But in reality these patterns follow the same pattern we have seen above: Paul prays to Christ in precisely the same way he does to God the Father.
Thus, in Paul’s benedictory prayers, which occur most frequently in the two letters to the Thessalonians, Paul directs his prayer to both God and Christ. In 1 Thessalonians he directs his prayer first to God and Christ together (with a singular verb), that they would “clear the way for us to come to you” (1 Thess. 3:11). This is immediately followed by prayer to Christ alone (vv. 12–13), that he would cause the Thessalonian Christians to increase and abound in love, both for one another and for all, and would also “strengthen your hearts” toward blameless and holy living. In 2 Thessalonians Paul does the same thing in reverse, directing the prayer to Christ and God together (again with a verb in the singular) but following with prayer directed toward God alone (2 Thess. 2:16–17). Then in two concluding prayers of this kind (2 Thess. 3:5, 16), only Christ is addressed. Once again, Paul is not here asserting something about Christ as to his deity; rather, he is clearly and simply assuming it—and he is doing this in such a way that he does not expect it to catch his readers’ special attention in some way. Again, the offhanded way this happens—and in this case happens so early—is striking evidence of Paul’s high Christology.
The same phenomenon can be seen in Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, both in more direct prayer and in his reports of his prayers. Thus in more direct prayer Paul concludes his first letter to the believers in Corinth with the (apparently) universal language of early Christian prayer, Marana tha, “Come, Lord” (1 Cor. 16:22). In his next letter to them he reports that he specifically petitioned Christ as Lord to remove the “thorn in [his] flesh” (2 Cor. 12:7) and that Christ answered: “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Cor. 12:9). Here again Paul is not trying to make a point about Christ’s deity. He is simply doing what has become natural for him: addressing prayer to Christ as often as to God the Father—and sometimes to both together. Deity is simply presupposed in such moments. And as Larry Hurtado has pointed out, such Christ devotion is in many ways more telling theologically than actual theological statements themselves. Devotion to Christ was simply taken for granted well before the earliest known statements about Christ emerged in the early Christian community. Both the acclamation by the Spirit that “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor. 12:3) and the Marana tha prayer (1 Cor. 16:22) precede any known attempts to express theologically the implications of such Christ devotion, and the latter surely arise out of the former.
For Paul, Christ the Savior is not just the mediator of salvation. Christ the Savior also emerges as the ongoing object of devotion and worship in the Pauline corpus—both for Paul and for his churches. Moreover, the worship is not only because of what Christ did for us but also, and especially, because of who he is as divine Savior.
Paul’s letters make clear that Christ’s significance as divine Savior did not begin with his earthly life as Jesus of Nazareth. Rather, that earthly life was an expression of an incarnation of the preexistent Son of God. Paul understands the exalted Son of God to be Lord of all, but he also presupposes that the Savior came to earth to redeem—language that assumes not simply birth as such but also incarnation, the birth of one who was fully divine. In order to understand the christological significance of Christ as divine Savior, then, we must come to terms with Paul’s understanding of the divine Savior as both preexistent and incarnate—and in that incarnation truly human in every aspect of our humanity but without sin. We turn to these matters in chapter 2.
. The Apostle uses the noun Kyrios—which our English Bibles regularly render “Lord”—to refer to Christ alone. This is remarkable since for several centuries before the coming of Christ, the Jewish community had used this “name” as their substitute for “Yahweh” so as never to take God’s name in vain. One of the seldom noted reasons for the Jewish community’s antipathy toward the followers of Jesus was the latter’s consistent use of the substitute name for Yahweh, Kyrios, to refer only to the risen Jesus of Nazareth. For the Jewish community, this was the ultimate blasphemy, which caused such a devotee as Saul of Tarsus to persecute followers of Jesus vigorously so as to bring them to justice before God. Then Saul himself became a disciple of Jesus and, after coming to use the name Paul, adopted this very practice.
. In addition to leading to the development of trinitarian doctrine, the early church’s triadic formulation for salvation also likely fueled the Jewish community’s sometimes hostile—especially in the case of Saul of Tarsus—antipathy toward the early disciples of Jesus. Along with the use of Kyrios for Jesus, this triadic formulation helps to explain Saul’s driving hatred of the nascent Christians, all of whom initially were Jews who had become disciples of Christ. For Saul, Jesus’s crucifixion served as the primary evidence that the one and only God had given Jesus of Nazareth what he well deserved. But it was in God’s own wisdom that the brilliant and totally incensed Saul of Tarsus would—not by his own choice, to be sure—eventually be chosen as the groundbreaker who, as Paul, would lead the nascent Christian faith to reach out to the known world so as also to include gentiles.
. Incidentally, this is perhaps the element missing the most in American Christianity since the United States’ national heritage has had a singular focus on the individual rather than on the gathered people as a community of faith who in our life together demonstrate the true nature of what it means to be saved.
. Paul’s preserved correspondence with the Corinthians, which comes to us in the form of 1 and 2 Corinthians, offers evidence of further correspondence between Paul and the Corinthian church that has not been preserved. When I henceforth refer to Paul’s first or second letter to the Corinthian church, I refer only to the letters that have been preserved in the New Testament as 1 and 2 Corinthians.
. This is also why every form of baptism that has abandoned immersion has given the rite a meaning quite different from that of the Apostle, which tends to focus on becoming members of a given community rather than being identified with Christ through their own form of “death, burial, and resurrection.”
. See Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).