CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 12
Paul and the Exalted Christ
If, as has been said above, “the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances mark the transition from the historical Jesus to the exalted Christ”,1 it is implied that the exalted Christ is continuous and personally identical with the historical Jesus. This continuity and personal identity were maintained by Paul. While, however, the historical Jesus was known to him only by hearsay and tradition, he claimed a direct and profound personal acquaintance with the exalted Christ.
1. The glory of that light
Paul makes little attempt to describe the form in which the exalted Christ appeared to him on the Damascus road, perhaps because words were inadequate for the purpose. Radiant light is the outstanding feature of the appearance as Paul recalls it. When, for example, he speaks of the ministry of the new covenant with which he was then entrusted, he contrasts it with the inferior ministry committed to Moses by setting over against the fading glory reflected on Moses’ face the unfading glory associated with the gospel.2 He describes the dawn of faith as “seeing the light of the gospel of the glory (doxa) of Christ, who is the image (eikōn) of God”—“for”, he goes on, “it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4, 6). As the old creation was inaugurated by the shining of light to dispel the darkness which lay “upon the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2 f.), so the new creation was inaugurated by the shining of light to dispel the blindness of unbelief; and Paul’s choice of this figure was probably dictated by his own experience. We recall the reference in Acts 9:3 to the “light from heaven” which “flashed about him” on the Damascus road; in the parallel account of the experience in Acts 22:11 Paul himself says that he could not see “because of the glory of that light”, and in all three records of the incident in Acts it is made fairly clear that in that light the risen Christ appeared to him (9:17; 22:14; 26:16).
While Paul had no doubt about the personal identity of the earthly Jesus and the heavenly Christ, he equally had no doubt that the heavenly Christ’s mode of existence was different from that of the earthly Jesus. When he affirms that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50)—i.e. the resurrection order—he makes it plain that this is as true of the Lord as of his people. The earthly Jesus was a man of woman born who endured a real death; but the risen Christ, while still man, was now vested with heavenly humanity, a different order of humanity from that of this present life. “The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:47). While the creation narrative of Genesis 2:7 tells how “the first man, Adam, became a living soul”, the character of the new creation is disclosed in the affirmation that “the last Adam became a life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). The risen Christ, for Paul, exists no longer in a body of flesh and blood but in a “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44).
Those who, even while living on earth in mortal bodies, are by faith united to the risen Christ have something of this new order of existence communicated to them. This is a different kind of personal union from those which bind human beings together in their present life. The closest personal union in this life is that between man and woman, described in the words of the creation narrative as their becoming “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24)—“but”, says Paul, “he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Corinthians 6:17). It is difficult to dissociate “one spirit” in this sense from the “one Spirit” in whom all the people of Christ are united into one body with him, just as it is difficult to dissociate the “life-giving spirit” that Jesus became in resurrection from the Spirit of life that indwells his people. To this we shall return.
If even while in mortal body a believer in Christ becomes “one spirit” with him, this unity is to become more fully experienced in resurrection. For the “spiritual body” worn by the risen Lord is the prototype for his people, who are to share his resurrection and have their present bodies of humiliation transmuted into the likeness of his body of glory (Philippians 3:21). “As we have borne the image of the man of dust”, says Paul, “we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:49). It was as the “man of heaven” that Jesus appeared to Paul on the Damascus road, we gather, vested with his body of glory; but when Paul attempts to describe what he saw, the only vocabulary he can use is that of light.
Paul looked forward to the parousia of Christ, his manifestation in glory; but the appearance of Christ at his parousia would be of the same character as his appearance on the Damascus road, except that it would not be a momentary flash but a more enduring experience, and that it would be accompanied by the instantaneous glorification of his people—whether by the resurrection of those who had died or the transformation of those still alive. The revelation of the Son of God would be attended by the simultaneous “revelation of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19), a prospect also described as their liberation from bondage to decay and futility, their adoption as sons, the redemption of their bodies (Romans 8:20–23). This is the climax of their salvation, the consummation of God’s eternal purpose of grace towards them.
“In this hope”, says Paul, “we were saved … But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24 f.). The subject-matter of this chapter relates to the present period of hope—the interval between the past event of Christ’s death and resurrection and the future event of his parousia.
2. The exalted Lord
Paul may well have been brought up to think of the days of the Messiah as an interval separating this age from the age to come, the resurrection age.3 But whether he had entertained the belief in such an interval before his conversion or not, the logic of the Christ-event imposed it on him now. Only, the days of the Messiah were not characterized by Messiah’s reigning from an earthly throne, like the throne of his father David, but by his reigning from the right hand of God. The oracle of Psalm 110:1, “Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool”, is one of the most primitive Christian testimonia. If, as was widely held, this oracle was addressed to the Messiah,4 then, since in the eyes of his followers Jesus was the Messiah, the oracle was fulfilled in him.
Paul does not often use the expression about the right hand of God; when he does so, it is probably because it had already become familiar to Christians when they confessed their faith in the Christ “who died, … who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, …”—as Paul puts it in Romans 8:34, apparently quoting such a confession of faith. (That is the only place where the expression occurs in his “capital” epistles; it appears also in Colossians 3:1 and Ephesians 1:20.) Like his fellow-Jews, he knew “the right hand of God” to be a metaphor denoting supreme authority, but he may have preferred to use it sparingly lest some of his Gentile hearers or readers should imagine that it had physical or local significance. It is, of course, difficult to think or speak of exaltation or supremacy without the use of spatial imagery. Christian astrophysicists who recite the historic creeds are not charged with inconsistency for employing the terminology of the three-decker universe; this terminology provides serviceable metaphors for the expression of transcendence, or of communication in both directions between God and man. Even in the first century such terminology was recognized by many thinking people as metaphorical, and among those thinking people Paul is entitled to be included.
Instead of referring to Christ as being seated at God’s right hand, Paul speaks of him as “highly exalted”,5 endowed with “the name which is above every name” (Philippians 2:9).6 The “name which is above every name” is the designation “Lord”. It is the divine purpose, says Paul (or the source which he quotes), that “every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:11). The Greek noun he uses is kyrios, which because of the Septuagint usage lent itself happily to this exalted connotation. In the Septuagint it is used not only to render such a Hebrew word as ʾādôn (“lord”) but also to render the ineffable name of the God of Israel—the name which we commonly reproduce as Yahweh. Thus the Septuagint of Psalm 110:1 uses kyrios twice—“The kyrios said to my kyrios”—just as most of our English versions use “Lord”: “The Lord said to my lord”. But the Hebrew text means “Yahweh’s oracle to my lord (ʾādôn)”. The person addressed by the psalmist as “my lord” was probably the Davidic king, so that the later messianic interpretation was not inappropriate.7 But in the Septuagint the person addressed in the oracle is designated by the same word as Yahweh himself: in that sense he shares “the name which is above every name”.
The wording of Philippians 2:10 f. is based on Isaiah 45:23, where Yahweh swears by himself: “To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear”.8 Here, however, it is in Jesus’ name that every knee shall bow, and it is Jesus’ lordship that every tongue shall confess. Nor is this by any means the only instance in the New Testament where an Old Testament passage containing kyrios as the equivalent of Yahweh is applied to Jesus.9 In any case, the title Lord in the highest sense that it can bear belongs distinctively to the risen and exalted Jesus, and not for Paul only. Luke’s testimony is to the same effect: his account of Peter’s address in Jerusalem at the first Christian Pentecost ends with the quotation of Psalm 110:1 and the peroration based on it, calling on all the house of Israel to know assuredly that God has made the crucified Jesus “both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:34–36).
To Paul, however (and to other early Christians), the acknowledgment of Jesus as Lord in the highest sense which that title can bear was far from being the result of a linguistic accident; it was far, too, from being but an ex officio designation of the Messiah. It was the most adequate term for expressing what he (and his fellow-believers) had come to understand and appreciate of Jesus’ person and achievement and his present decisive rôle in the outworking of God’s purpose of blessing for the universe.10
If it be asked if this use of the title “Lord” goes back to the earliest Aramaic-speaking phase of the church’s life, the answer is Yes. The Aramaic equivalent of Greek kyrios is mar, as in the invocation maranā–thā (“Our Lord, come”), which found its way untranslated into the vocabulary of Greek-speaking Christians (1 Corinthians 16:22)—more particularly, into the eucharistic liturgy (Didache 10:6).11 That mar could be used (as kyrios was) to denote the God of Israel is shown by the targum on Job from Cave 11 at Qumran, where the form mārē appears as an equivalent of Shaddai, and in the Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch from Cave 4, where maranā (9:4) and the emphatic state maryā (10:9) are used with reference to God.12
The title “Son of God” is also given to Jesus in a distinctive sense in resurrection: he was “designated Son of God in power, according to the Spirit of holiness, by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4). In Paul’s thought, of course, he did not begin to be Son of God at the resurrection: speaking of his coming into the world Paul says that “God sent forth his son, born of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). But during his earthly life he was the Son of God, comparatively speaking, “in weakness”;13 as the risen Lord he is the Son of God “in power”.14
Like the title “Lord”, “Son of God” was also confirmed by an oracular testimonium—by Psalm 2:7, where Yahweh addresses his anointed one in the words; “You are my Son; today I have begotten you”.15 But (like the title Lord “Son of God” is for Paul much more than a designation which Jesus, as Messiah, bears ex officio;16 it expresses the unique personal relation which Jesus bore to God, as indeed it appears to have done for Jesus himself.17
Luke seems to recognize the special place that the designation of Jesus as Son of God had in Paul’s ministry, for whereas he makes other preachers of the apostolic message in its early days proclaim Jesus as Lord and Messiah, he sums up Paul’s earliest public testimony to Jesus in the words, “He is the Son of God” (Acts 9:20). Perhaps the language in which Paul himself describes his call and commission, “God … was pleased to reveal his Son in me, that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles” (Galatians 1:15 f.), implies that an appreciation of Jesus as the Son of God was inherent in his conversion experience.
Although Paul makes infrequent use of the metaphor “the right hand of God”, he takes the oracle of Psalm 110:1 seriously as a messianic testimonium, and in fact in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28 he gives a fuller exposition of it than does any other New Testament writer. “Sit at my right hand”, ran the oracle, “till I make your enemies your footstool”—and Paul undertakes to identify these enemies. They are not flesh-and-blood enemies; they are “principalities and powers”, forces in the universe which work against the purpose of God and the well-being of man. It is to forces of this order that Paul has referred earlier in 1 Corinthians as the “rulers of this age” who, in ignorance of the hidden wisdom decreed by God from ages past for his people’s glory, “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:6–8). Pontius Pilate and others may have played their historic part in this, but without realizing it they were agents of those hostile forces in the spiritual realm. Now, thanks to the victory of the cross and the reign of the risen Lord, those forces are being progressively destroyed. The last and most intractable of those forces is death, which is to be destroyed at the final resurrection of which the resurrection of Christ is the first instalment.
“Sit at right hand”, said the oracle, “till I make your enemies your footstool”—so, says Paul, “Christ must reign till God has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25). But when all those enemies are subjugated, including death itself, then the reign of Christ is merged in the eternal reign of God. The reign of Christ, “the age of the Messiah”, is thus an intermediate phase between the present age and the endless age to come, or from certain points of view it may be regarded as the overlapping of the two, a phase in which the present age is not fully ended and the age to come has not been fully established.
A further word must be interjected here about those principalities and powers. A close examination of what Paul has to say about them shows that, to his way of thinking, they are largely those elemental forces that dominate the minds of men and women and are powerful so long as men and women believe in them and render them allegiance. But when their minds are liberated by faith in the crucified and risen Christ, then the bondage imposed by those forces is broken, their power is dissolved and they are revealed as the “weak and beggarly” nonentities that they are in themselves. To mention two of the most potent, the strength of sin and the fear of death could bind men and women’s lives in an iron grip, but those who enjoyed the liberation effected by Christ knew that sin had no more dominion over them and that even death, in advance of the coming resurrection, could be greeted as pure gain. The destruction of the principalities and powers may be expressed in figurative language, but the reality is the enjoyment of inward release and freedom experienced by the believer.18
In the passage already quoted from Romans 8:34, where Paul seems to echo a primitive confession of faith in “Christ Jesus who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God”, he continues with the clause: “who indeed intercedes for us”. The reigning Christ, that is to say, is not passively waiting for the Father to fulfil his promise to make his enemies his footstool; he is actively engaged on his people’s behalf. The confessional words are placed by Paul in a forensic context, in imitation of a recurring Old Testament motif19: he begins with the challenge, “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?” and affirms that no one will dare to fill the rôle of the Old Testament sāṭān20 and attempt to prosecute them in the heavenly court because God himself is their justifier and the Christ who died and rose is present as counsel for their defence.
The ascription of an intercessory ministry to the ascended Christ may be based on Isaiah 53:12, where the humiliated and vindicated Servant of the Lord is said to have “made intercession for the transgressors”;21 it is not peculiar to Paul among the New Testament theologians, for in 1 John 2:1 “Jesus Christ the righteous” is presented as his people’s “advocate with the Father”, while the theme is elaborated by the writer to the Hebrews in his portrayal of Jesus as the enthroned high priest, who “is able for all time to save those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).22
In other words, Christ’s active concern for his people is not exhausted by his death on their behalf; in his new order of existence he is still their friend and helper, supplying spiritual sustenance to meet their varied need.
3. The Lord and the Spirit
But when Paul deals with this supplying of the present spiritual need of the people of Christ, he does so for the most part in terms of the activity of the Spirit, to the point where much that he says about the ministry of the ascended Christ can be paralleled by what he says about the ministry of the Spirit. The love, for example, which the Spirit pours out into the hearts of believers (Romans 5:5) is no abstraction; it is described in 1 Corinthians 13 in almost personal terms, as though the character of Christ were being portrayed. Similarly, in 2 Corinthians 3:18 the Spirit’s function in the lives of believers is to transform them progressively into the image of Christ, “from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit”.
This phrase, “the Lord who is the Spirit”, is based on a midrashic interpretation which Paul has just been giving of the narrative in Exodus 34:29–35. Moses, his countenance shining from his confrontation with the divine glory, wore a veil to conceal the radiance from his fellow-Israelites, but removed it when he “went in before the Lord”. Paul takes this to mean that each time Moses went into the presence of God he was “re-charged” with the divine glory, and veiled his face when he went out so that the Israelites should not see that this glory was a fading one which required repeated renewal. The fading glory on Moses’ face is contrasted, as we have seen, with the unfading “glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6), by way of pointing the contrast between the inferior glory of the law, introduced for a limited period and destined to pass away, and the surpassing glory of the gospel, “the dispensation of the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:8).
But even in the Exodus narrative Paul sees the gospel age adumbrated: as Moses removed the veil from his face when he “went in before the Lord” (Exodus 34:34), so, “when a man turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now [Paul adds] the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:16 f.).23 That is to say, “the Lord” in the Exodus narrative corresponds to the Spirit in this new order, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom of access to the divine presence “with unveiled face”.24 Access to God in the dispensation of law, he implies, was difficult and hedged about with restrictions and inhibitions; access to God in the dispensation of the Spirit is free and unreserved.
The statement, “the Lord is the Spirit”, has been taken to assert an identity between Christ as Lord and the Spirit of God, but this is probably not Paul’s intention. The statement is rather Paul’s interpretation of Moses’ entering the divine presence, or his adaptation of Moses’ experience to that of the believer under the new covenant. What the Lord was to Moses, the Spirit is to the believer; yet in saying “the Lord is the Spirit” and in his later reference to “the Lord who is the Spirit”—literally “the Lord the Spirit”—Paul suggests, not indeed the identity, but certainly the close association that exists between the ascended Christ and the Spirit in the believer. His language, in the circumspect words of George Smeaton, a nineteenth-century Scottish theologian, “shows how fully he apprehended their joint mission, and how emphatically he intimates that Christ is never to be conceived of apart from the Spirit, nor the Spirit conceived of apart from Him”.25 In our own day Ernst Käsemann is more forthright, if less circumspect, and describes the Spirit as “the earthly praesentia of the exalted Lord”.26
But this is Professor Käsemann’s comment not on “the Lord who is the Spirit” but on a statement to which we have already alluded: that Jesus in resurrection became “a life-giving Spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45). And whatever may be said of “the Lord is the Spirit”, prima facie an identity of the risen Christ with the Spirit would seem to be affirmed in the clause: “the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit”. Elsewhere Paul knows of only one life-giving Spirit, and that is “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:2), the Spirit whose indwelling power quickens mortal bodies (Romans 8:11), the Spirit whose life-giving property is set in contrast with the death-dealing effect of the law (2 Corinthians 3:6), the Spirit through whom the believer’s inner being is renewed from day to day even while the outer being disintegrates (2 Corinthians 4:16), the Spirit whose presence within is the guarantee of the believer’s investiture with a heavenly and imperishable body (2 Corinthians 5:5).
True, in using the phrase “life-giving spirit” of the last Adam, Paul may be moved by the desire to find an appropriately balancing phrase to the “living soul” predicated of the first Adam in Genesis 2:7. But the phrase chosen to describe the last Adam is particularly suitable in view of two crucial articles of faith which Paul repeatedly emphasizes: (i) that Christ, by his resurrection from the dead, is the first-fruits of the resurrection harvest in which all his people will share, and (ii) that the Spirit has been given to his people here and now as the pledge and first instalment of their eventual participation in their Master’s resurrection life and glory. Here and now “he who is united to the Lord becomes one Spirit with him” (1 Corinthians 6:17). This is another balancing phrase, chosen by Paul as a counterpoise to the “one flesh” which man and woman become in marital union (Genesis 2:24), but it is not chosen for stylistic reasons only. It expresses a recurring theme in Pauline thought: “he who is united to the Lord” by faith derives from him eternal life now and the hope of glory to come; but since it is through the Spirit that the life and hope are mediated, “he who is united to the Lord becomes one Spirit with him”—and with all those who are similarly united to him.
4. The image of God
Paul, as we have seen, associates “the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” with the fact that Christ is “the image of God”. If the former phrase recalls his Damascus road experience, what about the latter phrase? Was there something about the appearance of the risen Christ which instantaneously impressed him as being the image of God? Did he, for example, see “a likeness as it were of a human form” as Ezekiel did when he saw “the likeness of the glory of the Lord” (Ezekiel 1:26, 28) and recognize that it was Jesus by the words which he heard him speak? We cannot be sure; it is difficult to know what meaning the expression “the image of God” would have had for Paul. Yet when he speaks of seeing “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” he uses language which practically amounts to seeing in Christ the image of God.27
Paul is not the only New Testament writer to present Christ in these terms: the Fourth Evangelist records the progressive revelation of God in the ministry of the incarnate Word, until it finds its climax on the cross; and the writer to the Hebrews speaks of the Son of God as “the effulgence of his glory and the very stamp of his being” (Hebrews 1:3). But it is in Paul that the presentation of Christ as the image of God is worked out most fully and consistently, with its corollary of the increasing transformation of the people of Christ into that same image by the power of the indwelling Spirit,28 until nothing remains of the earthly image in those who finally display the image of the heavenly man.29
Man, according to the Old Testament, was made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26 f.) and for his glory (Isaiah 43:7): in the order of creation he is, as Paul says, “the image and glory of God” (1 Corinthians 11:7).30 It is difficult to dissociate Paul’s portrayal of the risen Christ as the second man, the last Adam, from his view of Christ as the image of God and the revealer of his glory. What the first man was, imperfectly, in the old creation, Christ is, perfectly, in the new creation—the resurrection order.
It is tempting to go farther and relate another aspect of Paul’s christology to this appreciation of Christ as the image of God. In the Alexandrian book of Wisdom, which was evidently known to Paul, wisdom is not only personified but described as the “image” (eikōn) of God’s goodness.31
One thing is certain: that Paul, in common with some of his fellow-theologians among the New Testament writers, identified Christ with the wisdom of God and ascribed to him certain activities which are predicated of personified wisdom in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. When, for example, Paul speaks of the “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6), or describes him as “the image of the invisible God” in that “all things were created through him and for him” (Colossians 1:15 f.), this identification of Christ with divine wisdom underlies such statements, just as it underlies the affirmation of John 1:4 that “all things were made through him” (i.e. the incarnate Word) and that of Hebrews 1:2 that the Son of God is the one “through whom also he made the worlds”.32 But here it is not particularly the risen Christ that is in view: it is the eternal Christ, whose entry into the world of mankind was no involuntary experience but a deliberate act of condescension: “being in the form of God, … he emptied himself and took the form of a servant” (Philippians 2:6 f.);33 “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor” (2 Corinthians 8:9).
If this aspect of Paul’s christology is not related to his vision of Christ as the image of God, then it is difficult to relate it to Paul’s subsequent personal experience of Christ. Before his conversion he probably identified divine wisdom with the Torah, the “desirable instrument”34 by which God made the world, if not the goal for which he made it.35 After his conversion the centrality of the Torah in Paul’s thought and life was displaced by the centrality of Christ, and this might suggest the transference to Christ of properties and activities previously ascribed to the Torah. But this is less likely: Christ displaced the Torah in Paul’s scheme of things, but, far from being its equivalent, he was for Paul “the end of the law” (Romans 10:4).36 But he was not the end of divine wisdom; he was its very embodiment.
It is probably significant, however, that the pre-existent Christ is not associated by Paul with the Spirit as the risen Christ is: for Paul, the Spirit is distinctively the herald and sign of the new age, coming into his purview first of all in relation to Christ’s being “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4). Why the phrase “Spirit of holiness” should be used here rather than Paul’s more usual “Holy Spirit” is a matter for inquiry, but it is a literal translation of the Hebrew construction for “holy spirit”37 and so cannot be distinguished in meaning from “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead”, whose residence in the lives of the people of Christ is the pledge of their resurrection too (Romans 8:11). The Spirit of Christ, as Albert Schweitzer put it, “is the life-principle of His Messianic personality”;38 it is the living Christ himself who is his people’s hope of glory and it is in him that the hope is to be realized: “When Christ who is our life appears”, says Paul, “then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians 3:4). When the people of Christ in resurrection share fully in the image of their exalted Lord, the Spirit’s present ministry has been fulfilled. But the Spirit who fulfils this present ministry is the Spirit that came upon Jesus before he came upon his followers: for Paul, in other words, the exalted Lord whose risen life and power are conveyed to his people by the indwelling Spirit is identical and continuous with him who lived among men as a servant, the crucified one, the historical Jesus.