Additional Notes §19
§19 Paul’s Present Code of Values (Phil. 3:7–11)
What Paul formerly regarded as achievement he now acknowledges to have been failure. What he would formerly have regarded as worthless and indeed pernicious he now recognizes to be the only achievement worth pursuing—the personal knowledge of Jesus as Lord, sharing the experience of his death and resurrection.
3:7 / It was but reasonable to take pride, as Paul once did, in such a catalogue of merit. If a reader suspects that Paul still feels some pride in being able to present such a record of past achievement, all such suspicion is swept away by what Paul now says: whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ—that is, for the sake of gaining Christ. From the credit side of the ledger they have been transferred to the debit side; they are not merely seen to be valueless and irrelevant, but he would be better off without them. Perhaps the very recollection of such attainments could now be harmful if it carried with it the temptation to put some confidence in them again. Christ alone must be the object of Paul’s confidence, and for the sake of Christ all these former objects of confidence have lost the value they once had. Paul had learned that, in spite of them all, his only ground of acceptance before God was ground that he shared with the rawest convert from paganism: faith in Christ. He does not deny that it was a great privilege to have been born a Jew and have access to the oracles of God (Rom. 3:1, 2); he does deny that one can rely on such a privilege as a basis of divine approval.
3:8 / In truth, not only Paul’s personal heritage and achievement but everything in the world has been transvalued by Christ. So surpassing was the greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord that, by comparison with it, everything else was not merely valueless but had negative value. Whatever existed outside of Christ and the gospel that he had commissioned Paul to make known throughout the world was a dead loss, the sort of thing to be lost or thrown away, like so much rubbish, the merest street-sweepings. When he entered the service of Christ on the Damascus road, that meant the renunciation of all that he had chiefly prized up to that moment; it was a renunciation well worth making.
The knowledge of God was of paramount value in the eyes of the great prophets of Israel (cf. Hos. 6:6); for Paul the knowledge of God was supremely mediated through Christ, and in being so mediated it was immensely enriched. “Knowledge” (Gk. gnōsis) was a current term in the religious and philosophical vocabulary of Paul’s day; the “knowledge” that was widely sought and esteemed was partly intellectual, partly mystical. Some forms of the current cultivation of “knowledge” developed into the systems of thought that appear in the second century under the general designation of “Gnosticism.” Such “knowledge” was pursued in the Corinthian church, and Paul was not impressed by it: “Knowledge,” he said, “puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor. 8:1). A community was helped to grow to maturity much more by love of God and love of one’s fellows than by the pursuit of knowledge. Knowing Christ Jesus my Lord is personal knowledge: it includes the experience of being loved by him and loving him in return—and loving, for his sake, all those for whom he died. It is not certain that here, as in his Corinthian correspondence, Paul is contrasting this personal knowing of Christ with inferior forms of knowledge: he is assuredly emphasizing that it is the only form of knowledge worth having, a knowledge so transcendent in value that it compensates for the loss of everything else.
To know Christ and to gain Christ are two ways of expressing the same ambition. If Christ is the one “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), to know him means to have access to those treasures; but to know him for his own sake is what matters to Paul most of all.
Paul had never known the earthly Jesus. If, during Jesus’ ministry, Paul had learned anything about his teaching and activities, he would have disapproved. After Jesus’ arrest and execution, Paul thought of him with repulsion as one on whom, by the very nature of his death, the curse of God rested: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree” (Gal. 3:13). Those who proclaimed such a person to be the Lord’s anointed, as the disciples of Jesus did, were blasphemers; the well-being of Israel demanded their extinction. And, quite apart from Paul’s antipathy to all that Jesus stood for, how can one enjoy a personal relationship with someone who has died and whom one never knew?
When God chose, on the Damascus road, to reveal his Son to Paul, the Son of God at the same time introduced himself to Paul: “I am Jesus,” he said. Immediately Paul was captivated by him and became his bondslave for life. “What shall I do, Lord?” he asked him, and his whole subsequent career was one of obedience to the answer that his question drew forth (Acts 22:7–10). In that moment Paul knew himself to be loved by the Son of God who, as he was to say, “loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). For him henceforth the “first and great commandment,” to love the LORD his God, was honored in his love for Christ, the image of God: “the man who loves God is known by God” (1 Cor. 8:3). A relationship of mutual knowledge and love was established there and then between the apostle on earth and his exalted Lord, and to explore the fullness of this relationship was from now on Paul’s inexhaustible joy. For him, in short, life was Christ—to love Christ, to know Christ, to gain Christ: “Christ is the way, and Christ the prize.”
3:9 / To gain Christ means to be found in him, to enjoy faith-union with him (and therefore also with the rest of his people); compare NEB: “for the sake of … finding myself incorporate in him.” Paul was intensely aware and appreciative of his one-to-one relationship with the risen Christ, but it was not an exclusive relationship: “I knew that Christ had given me birth / To brother all the souls on earth” (John Masefield, “The Everlasting Mercy”). He was already “in Christ” but here he speaks of his ambition to be found in him. The aorist tense of the verbs “gain” and “be found” suggests that he is again looking forward to the day of Christ. But his ambition to be found in him on that great day can be realized only if he is continuously and progressively living in union with him during this mortal existence, and to this end Paul gladly jettisons everything else, including his formerly prized righteousness … that comes from the law.
The man who had attained full marks in competing for legal righteousness now threw that righteousness overboard, for he had found a better kind. What good had legal righteousness done him after all? It had not saved him from the sin of persecuting the followers of Christ. Anyone who sought legal righteousness could no doubt claim it as his own, but it was fatal to imagine that such a righteousness, which was inevitably self-righteousness, could establish a claim on God.
But with the better righteousness—that which is through faith in Christ—there is no question of establishing a claim on God; it is God himself who gives this righteousness. It comes from God and is by faith. Faith in Christ is the means by which sinners appropriate it; they are “justified by faith in Christ, and not by observing the law” (Gal. 2:16). It is good to do what the law requires, but that is not the way to receive the righteousness that God bestows. Paul’s trusted foundation of legal righteousness collapsed beneath his feet on the Damascus road, when he suddenly saw himself to be the chief of sinners; but in that same instant he received through faith in the Son of God the new and durable foundation of righteousness freely bestowed by God’s grace. Now, and forever after, he knew himself to be accepted by God for Christ’s sake.
3:10 / I want to know Christ: once more Paul states his ambition. He had lived with the knowledge of Christ for many years, but he found in Christ an inexhaustible fullness; there was always more of him to know. So much was this knowledge a matter of interpersonal union that to know Christ meant to experience the power of his resurrection. If the love of God is supremely demonstrated in the death of Christ (Rom. 5:8), his power is supremely demonstrated in the resurrection of Christ, and those who are united by faith with the risen Christ have this power imparted to them. “That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead” (Eph. 1:19, 20); it is the power which, among other things, enables the believer to ignore the dictates or enticements of sin and to lead a life of holiness which pleases God.
If, on one plane, Paul shared the power of Christ’s risen life, on another plane he shared his sufferings. To suffer for Christ, he has said already (1:29), is a privilege; moreover, to suffer for him is to suffer with him. “The sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives” (2 Cor. 1:5), he says in the letter that perhaps more than any other discloses this aspect of Paul’s apostleship. In Paul’s eyes, the sufferings he endured for Christ’s sake in the course of his apostolic service represented his share in the sufferings of Christ, and to accept them as such transfigured and glorified them. It was also his hope that, by absorbing as many of these afflictions as possible in his own person, he would “fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24) and leave less for his fellow Christians to endure. Thus he might make some personal recompense for the zeal with which he had once made the people of Christ suffer and so persecuted Christ himself (cf. Acts 9:4, 5). Nor does he show any spirit of self-pity in speaking thus: it was an honor to share in the sufferings of Christ and so to enter into closer personal fellowship with him.
Becoming like Christ in his death was for Paul partly self-identification with Christ crucified, partly a matter of daily experience, partly an anticipation of bodily death, which would more probably than not take the form of martyrdom for Christ’s sake (as in the event it did).
So far as self-identification with Christ is concerned, the dying with Christ enacted in baptism at the outset of Paul’s Christian career (Rom. 6:2–11) was no make-believe; it exercised a decisive influence on him from then on: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:19, 20).
So far as daily experience was concerned, Paul could say, “I die every day!” (1 Cor. 15:31). He could speak of “carry[ing] around in our body the death [or rather the ‘dying’] of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body” (2 Cor. 4:10). And if he should one day face the executioner for Jesus’ sake, that would crown his likeness to Christ in his death. Death, and especially such a death as that, would (as he has said in 1:21) be sheer gain for one to whom life meant Christ.
There were no doubt some people in the Gentile churches (not necessarily in the church of Philippi) who viewed Paul’s hardships, including his present imprisonment, as a sign that he had not yet reached that stage of spiritual perfection that they themselves claimed to have attained (cf. 1 Cor. 4:8). Paul views them quite differently: they are for him the indispensable conditions of identification with Christ in glory: “If indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory” (Rom. 8:17).
3:11 / Experiencing the power of Christ’s resurrection here and now was not a substitute for looking forward to the resurrection of the body, as some of Paul’s Corinthian converts appear to have thought (1 Cor. 15:12). Christ’s resurrection, the power of which was imparted to his people even in their present mortal life, involved the hope for those who died believing in him “that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus” (2 Cor. 4:14). Paul will return to this later (vv. 20, 21). Here he speaks personally: if one who faced death daily for Christ’s sake was liable to end mortal life as a martyr for him, so one who experienced the power of his resurrection day by day could look forward with certainty to sharing his resurrection after death. The hope which Paul implies (and so, somehow, to attain …) is no uncertain hope for him, but one that is sure and well-founded. If his language implies any uncertainty—“if only I may finally arrive at the resurrection from the dead” (NEB)—it may lie in Paul’s belief that, even at this late stage in his career, he might not pass through death after all but still be alive at the coming of Christ. But all the signs pointed to his having to undergo death, and a violent death in all probability. His assurance, however, was that if “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead,” he is “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20). “We know,” he says in 2 Corinthians 5:1, “that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.”
The NIV rendering, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead, brings out the clear implication of Paul’s wording: that the resurrection of believers is a resurrection that brings them out of the realm where the rest of the dead are.
3:7 / I now consider: Gk. hēgēmai (perfect); the reference is not particularly to his conversion experience, as it would be if the aorist hēgēsamēn had been used. (In v. 8 I consider represents the present hēgoumai.)
Paul’s language here is different from the adaptation of the book-keeping terminology of profit and loss occasionally found elsewhere. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.4.13, where justice is said to be the mean between profit and loss (no one gets more or less than is due); also Pirqe Abot 2.1, where Rabbi Judah the Prince (ca. A.D. 200) is credited with the precept: “Reckon the loss incurred by the fulfillment of a commandment against the reward secured by its observance, and the gain acquired by a transgression against the loss it involves.”
3:8 / What is more: Gk. alla menounge kai (“Yes indeed; I even …”). Gk. alla kai is reinforced by the compound particle (men, oun, and ge), which emphasizes its progressive sense (cf. M. E. Thrall, Greek Particles in the New Testament, pp. 15, 16).
F. W. Beare (ad loc.) has a helpful discussion of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. Paul’s language here cannot be accounted for in terms either of the Hebraic or of the Hellenic background of gnōsis: rather, he makes “a new, creative fusion of the Hellenic with the Hebraic, which issues in a distinctively Christian synthesis far richer than either, though it is the heir of both.” In this synthesis, it should be added, the most important element was the personal knowledge of Christ that Paul had already gained; he expands its significance in v. 10. See R. Bultmann, TDNT, vol. 1, pp. 689–714, s.v. “ginōskō,” “gnōsis” etc.; J. Dupont, Gnosis; La connaissance religieuse dans les épîtres de saint Paul; B. E. Gartner, “The Pauline and Johannine Idea of ‘to know God’ against the Hellenistic Background,” NTS 14 (1967–68), pp. 209–31.
I have lost all things: Gk. ta panta ezēmiōthēn (passive), lit., “I have been fined everything”; “I have been deprived of all that I have,” which may imply such penalization or disinheritance as he had suffered because of his commitment to Christ as well as his willing renunciation of all for Christ’s sake.
3:9 / To be found in him: Gk. hina … heurethō. For the use of the passive of heuriskein as a surrogate for the verb “to be” or “to become” cf. 2:7. See also E. D. Burton, The Epistle to the Galatians, p. 125 (in a note on Gal. 2:17). If it be asked at what time Paul hopes to be found in Christ, the answer may be “on the day of Christ”; but he knows that he will be found in Christ then only if he lives in Christ now.
The righteousness that comes from God is “God’s way of putting people right with himself” (Rom. 3:21)—a right relationship with God received by divine grace and not achieved from the law. It is through faith in Christ: Gk. dia pisteōs Christou, where NIV is certainly right in treating Christou as objective genitive, although some wish to treat it as subjective genitive and render the phrase, “through Christ’s faithfulness” (cf. Rom. 3:22, 26; Gal. 2:16). See J. A. Ziesler, The Meaning of Righteousness in Paul; F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians, pp. 138–40 (in a note on Gal. 2:16).
3:10 / I want to know Christ: Gk. tou gnōnai auton, “in order to know him,” where the aorist infinitive follows the precedent of the aorists kerdēsō (I may gain) and heurethō (“I may be found”) in vv. 8, 9. It is with the knowledge of Christ to be experienced in this life that Paul is here concerned (as in v. 8, knowing Christ Jesus my Lord). It is pointless to say that “Paul undoubtedly borrows from the Gnostics in describing the gnōsis Christou lēsou as a distinctive mark of the Christian” when it is conceded, almost in the same breath, that the content of vv. 8–11 “is very different from Gnosticism” since “Paul is not describing individual experiences but the character of Christian existence in general” (R. Bultmann, TDNT, vol. 1, pp. 710, 711, s.v. “ginōskō, “gnōsis,” etc.). It might be, as W. Schmithals says, that Paul here “sets the true knowledge of Jesus Christ in opposition to the ‘contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge’ ” (Paul and the Gnostics, p. 92), if it were clear that Paul had in mind proponents of such a rival gnōsis (see notes on vv. 18, 19 below).
On Paul’s desire for sharing in Christ’s sufferings see B. M. Ahern. “The Fellowship of His Sufferings (Phil 3:10),” CBQ 22 (1960), pp. 1–32; also H. Seesemann, Der Begriff KOINŌNIA im Neuen Testament.
3:11 / And so, somehow: Gk. ei pōs, “if perhaps,” “if by any means,” introducing a clause of purpose where the attainment of the purpose is not altogether within the subject’s power; cf. Acts 27:12, of the sailors’ hope of making Phoenix and spending the winter there; Rom. 1:10, of Paul’s prayer that it may be possible for him at last to visit Rome; 11:14, of his hope to promote the salvation of his fellow Jews by moving them to covet a share in the gospel blessings so much enjoyed by Gentile believers. See BDF, §375.
The noun exanastasis, “resurrection,” is unparalleled in NT; the addition of the prefix ex- before the regular form anastasis (used, e.g., in v. 10) reinforces the significance of the preposition ek in the following phrase ek nekrōn, “out from among dead ones,” and emphasizes that the end-time bodily resurrection of the just is in view, not simply a present spiritual resurrection. It “is intended unmistakably to convey the realism of the resurrection from among the physically dead, but it makes sense only if it is distinguished from another interpretation” (J. Gnilka, ad loc.)—the other interpretation being presumably that against which Paul makes a full statement of the doctrine of resurrection in 1 Cor. 15. Again, this may be so; we cannot be sure.