Category Archives: Paul and Paul’s letters

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“In Christ”: united with Christ, immersed in Christ

I knew biblical passages about our solidarity with Christ—we are “in Christ,” we are the body of Christ, and so on. But I wasn’t sure how that connected with our personal spiritual experience of Christ. Was it related to Christ living in us (Gal 2:20)? Was it related to experiencing his resurrection life through the Spirit? After all, ancient Israelites were corporately related to Jacob without a personal experience of Jacob. Humanity is sinful without humans today having ever personally met a guy named Adam.

But of course, as I learned, the nature of the relationship is not exactly the same. We are reckoned in Adam in Rom 5:12-21 as Adam’s heirs, as descendants and fellow sinners. We become reckoned in Christ through baptism into Christ, not through genetic descent. “Adam” might dwell in us in some sense (in terms of solidarity as descendants and sinners), but the Spirit of Christ makes Christ present to us more dynamically (Rom 8:9).

Solidarity with Christ

Paul emphasizes that believers’ solidarity with Christ brings deliverance greater than the defeat effected by our solidarity with Adam (Rom 5:12-21). He then goes on to develop the theme of our union with Christ rather than with the “old person” (6:6) in Adam. Baptized into Christ (6:3-4), we share Christ’s death and resurrection (6:3-6a, 11). Paul can take for granted that being baptized into Christ entails baptism into his death because he understands that immersion into Christ includes sharing his experience. It is not merely theoretical.

“Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried with him by this baptism into this death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life. For since we’ve been grafted together/united with/identified with him in the image of his death, still more certainly we shall be united/identified with him in the image of his resurrection. We know that our old self was crucified with him … So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:3-5a, 11, ESV)

This sense of solidarity with Christ is not limited to one passage. Not also Colossians 3: “For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3 NASB); “Christ who is your life” (3:4, NRSV); you “have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator” (3:10 NIV).

Paul finds partial analogies for this solidarity in shared experience in terms of sharers with Adam in sin (Rom 5:12-21) and Israel’s shared experience with Moses. In 1 Cor 10:2, by analogy with Christian experience of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, Israelites were “baptized into Moses” (though, Paul warns, they failed to persevere). We may think similarly how Jesus recapitulates elements of Israel’s experience in the early chapters of Matthew’s Gospel.

Being baptized into Christ means that we have clothed ourselves with Christ (Gal 3:27); we share in him a new identity. We have put on the new person, recreated in God’s image (Eph 4:22-24; Col 3:9-10), as humanity was created in God’s image in the beginning (Gen 1:26). Obviously this solidarity has a forensic dimension: that is, how God views us in Christ. Yet it also must impact reality on our side as well as God’s. We are called to be what we are in Christ. In Christ, we must put off the old person (what we were in Adam) and put on the new, recreated in God’s image (Eph 4:22-24; cf. Col 3:8). We must live according to the new identity God has conferred on us in Christ.

Paul says that as we bore Adam’s mortal image, we shall also bear the immortal image of Christ (1 Cor 15:49). Progressively (2 Cor 3:17) and ultimately (Rom 8:29) we are conformed to the image of Christ, who is God’s image (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). We are conformed to this image by being shaped by the fruit of the Spirit within us (Gal 5:22-23), essentially by Christ living in us (Gal 2:20).

Immersed in Christ

How is this sharing of Christ effected in us? The Spirit of Christ (Rom 8:9) lives in us.

The Spirit baptizes us into Christ: “by/in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (1 Cor 12:13). Ancient Jewish baptisms were ritual immersions, so the picture here is of the Spirit immersing us in Christ. This picture suggests that being clothed with Christ is not limited only to the way God sees us.

Paul’s expressions would make sense to those already familiar with early Christian language inherited from John the Baptist: “he will baptize you in the Holy Spirit” (Matt 3:11; Mark 1:8; Luke 3:16; John 1:33; Acts 1:5; 11:16). (There is also a narrower sense of this phrase in the NT, but at this point I am using the phrase in the more general way.)

Not surprisingly, then, Luke, who speaks of the church being baptized in the Spirit, in his narratives parallels the ministries of the Jerusalem Jesus movement (led by Peter) and the Diaspora mission (led by Paul) with Jesus’s ministry. The same Lord worked in both Peter and Paul (Gal 2:7-8).

Because the Spirit of God is also the Spirit of Christ, being immersed in the Spirit entails being immersed in Christ. We read the Gospels as the story of our hero, but also our model, and the one the Spirit empowers us to follow. Thus in three successive paragraphs, Mark announces Jesus as the Spirit-baptizer (Mark 1:8), the pioneer of the Spirit-baptized life (1:9-11), and as the model of what this looks like as the Spirit thrusts him into conflict with the spiritual enemy (1:12-13). Jesus keeps warning disciples that they must share both his faith (9:19, 23, 29; 11:21-24) and his suffering (8:34; 13:13).

Walking in Christ

“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, walk in him, rooted and constructed in him” (Col 2:6-7)

“This is how we know that we’re in him: whoever claims to dwell in him ought to walk just as he walked” (1 John 2:5-6)

Our solidarity with Adamic humanity comes by birth. In Adam, we share glorious DNA designed to reflect God’s image yet alienated from God’s presence and purpose by human sin.

Our solidarity with Christ comes by baptism, yes, in water, at the entrance into new life, but also in the Spirit. We share Christ’s life, death, burial and resurrection because we are immersed in him. Through the mind of the Spirit (Rom 8:5), the mind of Christ (1 Cor 2:16), we grow to think in his ways and act how Jesus would. The old adage, “What would Jesus do?” is more than a slogan; it invites us to think and act as Jesus thinks and acts, just as Jesus acted only as he saw the Father acting (John 5:19-20). The Spirit communicates Christ himself in the preaching of the gospel (see John 16:7-11; 1 Thess 2:13). Because Christ lives in us by the Spirit (John 14:17), we bear his fruit like branches on the vine (15:4-5), continuing many aspects of his mission (20:21-22). To walk in the Spirit (Gal 5:16) is also to walk in Christ (Col 2:6).

To the extent that we recognize that God has effected our solidarity with Christ, we can appropriate that identity as members of Christ (i.e., of his body; Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 6:15; Eph 4:25). We can remember that Christ lives in us and trust his character to live through us. The better we know what he is like, the more we can reflect that character by faith. Because we are each unique members of his body, we will individually reflect different aspects of his ministry. None of us is the entire body of Christ to himself.

It should be able to go without saying, but unfortunately often can’t go without saying, that we do not take the place of Jesus; the opposite must be the case: Jesus as Lord reigns in us so as to make his heart known. This comes through our direct relationship with the head, Jesus Christ, who is the source of our new life: Eph 4:15-16; Col 2:19; 3:4a).

We aren’t Jesus, but we are his agents. And when those agents work together, those around can see a fuller picture of Christ’s character through his body functioning together. As his body we together ideally reveal his character, his heart, his purposes, so that it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us (Gal 2:20). Immersed in Christ, clothed in Christ, we want our lives to reveal Christ in what we say and do and think. Together as the diverse members of Christ’s body, we are invited to show the world what Christ among them would do, proving God’s transforming power even to the heavenly rulers (Eph 3:10). Ideally, we as Christ’s body should mature into unity in trusting and knowing Christ (Eph 4:12-13). No one has seen God, but by loving one another we give the world a taste of God (1 John 4:12), and we know that we live in him and he in us because he has given us his Spirit (1 John 4:13).

Scholars debate today the meaning of “baptism in the Spirit.” More important than those debates about wording, however (which I deliberately sidestep in this post) is that we really embrace all that the Spirit wants to do in us. God desires to enable us to live like those immersed in his Spirit, and immersed in Christ. God wants people to continue to see what Jesus is like as the Spirit of Christ works in and through us.

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Discussing the New Perspective

This video link is a discussion among three of us professors at Asbury regarding the New Perspective(s): Joe Dongell, Ben Witherington, and myself, with Prof. Ruth Anne Reese moderating. I am just about nine minutes at the end before I get cut off (maybe because I am too old-fashioned on pistis Christou 🙂 ) but I get to pick up in the second half. The three of us vary on some minor details among ourselves and this is really more about introducing the topic of New Perspective(s) than about our specific views, though we touch on those some …

https://vimeo.com/318782568/88c8c7d4f2 and https://vimeo.com/318781979/ea6077bfc7

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Are There Apostles Today? (part 2)

Are there apostles today?

As noted in part 1, that depends on what you mean by an apostle. In contrast how some define it today, biblical apostleship does not seem to be a matter of summoning people to accept one’s authority. The Jerusalem church had elders in addition to the founding apostles; the elders may have exercised administrative authority, whereas the apostles’ authority inhered in their mission. Paul had a special apostolic authority in relation to the Corinthian Christians because he had birthed and labored over them (1 Cor 9:2); when he was coming to a church he had not founded, however, he simply offered to share with them from his spiritual gift (Rom 1:11-12). Even the apostle Peter is clear that church leaders as a whole should not “lord it over” others (1 Pet 5:3).

Although some passages about apostleship in the NT do mention signs (e.g., 2 Cor 12:12; Matt 10:8), they emphasize sufferings even more heavily (e.g., 1 Cor 4:9-13; Matt 10:16-39). Apostleship was not an authority to boast in, but a calling of service that involved suffering. An apostle as an agent of Christ was to act in Jesus’s name, as in a sense all of us Christians are to do; that means that Jesus should get all the credit for the works (cf. Rom 15:18-19; Acts 3:12-16; 14:15). Where the agent rather than Jesus takes credit, eventually the agent may be left to work on their own, instead of the Lord doing the work through them. That is, they may have to depend on marketing gimmicks instead of God’s blessing to maintain their hearing. One wonders if this has not sometimes happened.

In Scripture, apostles apparently normally break new ground, rather than simply laying on another’s foundation (Rom 15:20). The Jerusalem apostles initially broke ground for ministry in Jerusalem and then oversaw the work for some time; Paul and his coworkers broke ground in the cities of the northern Mediterranean world. (Some of his coworkers occasionally appear to be apostles as well, as in Rom 16:7; 1 Thess 2:6-7; at least some, such as Timothy, were converted after him, Acts 14:6-8; 16:1-3.) Paul had suffered and done the work, but his rivals wanted to take over his work and boast in it. They were poaching in the sphere of ministry God had given him, and Paul charges them with false apostleship (2 Cor 10:12-16; 11:12-13).

If some today believe that God has called them to be apostles according to the biblical model, they may need to distinguish their ministry from practices that distort biblical apostleship. Otherwise all those who use the term may face a backlash just as happened in antiquity. In Revelation and the Didache, those who claimed to be apostles or prophets were tested. Soon after that, the church began limiting the title to the Twelve (the narrower Lukan usage rather than Paul’s broader usage). Without being harsh toward those who abuse the label “apostles,” those who use the title but stand for a different kind of ministry should clarify that their mission is different. They are called to serve the church, not to divide it.

I discuss this matter further in part 3 (to be continued).

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Paul, Apostle of Christ—the movie

Here are my first impressions of Paul: Apostle of Christ, which came to our area today. First of all, I am very grateful that such films are being made. That gratitude overwhelms reservations on any other points. As you might guess (because I am a biblical scholar), movies about biblical themes are my favorite, and among the few kinds of movies I must see.

The various scenes of Rome are splendidly done; they make ancient Rome look like ancient Rome. For modern viewers far removed from the world of the New Testament, this provides an invaluable benefit. The film also dramatically captures the horror of people being murdered for their faith (or because the powerful in society deem them expendable). I appreciated the numerous echoes of Paul’s letters (and a crack about the Corinthians), although sometimes when Paul tells Luke to write something down it comes from Paul’s earlier letters, not from Acts.

Among major roles, Aquila and Priscilla are depicted particularly movingly. (I doubt that their domicile was as large as in the movie, unless they were fairly rich, but that they would have taken people in is quite plausible.) Paul’s discouragement and determination are depicted clearly, but given the Paul of the letters I would have also expected a greater display of broken-heartedness over the suffering of the believers (cf. e.g., Phil 2:27; 1 Thess 2:8; 3:1-5, 8) and greater expressions of joy when he contemplated his future with Christ.

I felt that many scenes of Paul and Luke could have moved faster with more concise dialogue rather than lingering so often for dramatic effect; in turn, I would also have preferred to see more of Paul’s past in flashbacks. But admittedly, I am an Acts and New Testament backgrounds scholar, not a film critic. (I am also ADHD and need to catch up on sleep, which may explain my current preference for faster scenes.)

Much of the background is very helpful, though obviously the producers had to make choices. I agree with their choice about why Luke ends Acts where he does, and I personally appreciate their drawing on the full range of Pauline material in the New Testament (as well as some subsequent tradition, as with the Mamertine prison) to flesh out their picture of Paul’s final custody. They correctly recognize Nero’s persecution to be local.

Some background could be argued differently: they date the persecution to A.D. 67, and I date it to much closer to the fire in 64 (although they may envision the persecution continuing since 64). They depict Christians burned to light Rome’s (surviving) narrow streets at night, but the source, Tacitus, is clear only about the burning in Nero’s gardens. (Admittedly, Luke wouldn’t be walking around in Nero’s gardens, so their choice makes cinematic sense.) In the movie Paul claims that he spent three years in Arabia to get to know Christ, as Peter got to know Christ for three years. On the former point, some of us think that Paul evangelized among Nabateans; and on the latter, the three-year-period (based on inferences from the Gospel of John) is possible but disputed. Prostitutes in temples are also a matter of dispute, though this appears only as a passing mention (like the Prince of Egypt’s “There go the pyramids,” although Goshen was in northern Egypt, far from the pyramids). In one scene the officer apparently pours sacrificial blood over his head; this may evoke the taurobolium and Mithraism, but Mithraism began sweeping the Roman army especially in the second and third century, not the first.

These are each extremely minor questions; of greater concern to me was the downplaying of healings associated with Paul, although signs and healings constitute roughly 20 percent of Acts. The healings are acknowledged as real, but almost so backhandedly that only one familiar with Acts will realize it. Film is a perfect medium for the dramatic, and even Paul receiving his sight could have been made more dramatic by showing scales falling from his eyes when he was healed as in Acts 9:18. (I suppose, returning to my previous allusion, that Prince of Egypt spoiled me.) Most of the movie’s viewers probably have no problem with miracles. Moreover, historically, ancient medicine was not generally very reliable; why does Paul then express greater confidence in Luke’s success, which appears almost miraculous, than in God performing a more direct healing? Nevertheless, Paul in the movie directs both the Roman officer and the modern viewer to the right place: God, not Paul, does the miracles, and the gospel is about a salvation that goes deeper than miracles.

From my vantage point as a New Testament scholar, however, what is most profound about the movie is its emphasis on the way of love and disavowing revenge. The viewer understands why some in the movie want to strike back; it is precisely what many of us might want to do. That passion runs deep in our culture (like many others). Paul’s insistent refusal to support such violence therefore poses a challenge to widely held personal values today and also to the stereotype the wider North American society often holds of Christians. The value of these scenes for the present cultural moment outweighs any possible weaknesses elsewhere in the movie, as a reminder both to Christians and to the wider culture of what Christ stands for.

In the same way, the film brings home the reality and grotesqueness of suffering in a way that invites us to consider how we would respond. Paul’s (and Jesus’s) message about eternal life outweighing the cost of martyrdom is a needed reminder for a generation of Western Christians that has not experienced death on the scale of a massive invasion and has certainly not experienced lethal persecution. If we someday face such challenges, that message will be essential for us to remember. Nor is that message a reminder only for the future; if we are able to die for Christ, we are also to live for him, devoting our time and resources to him while we live. May God burn this reminder deeply in our hearts.

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Paul and the Law

Scholars articulate a range of views concerning Paul’s approach to the law. A basic summary of my own current perspective (which surfaces at points in my small 2009 Romans commentary) might be as follows:

  • Paul respects the law as God’s Word; this includes both the narrative and the legal material.
  • Paul believes that the law was meant to teach right behavior (much of which is universal, though Paul does not usually spell out the hermeneutic that guides how he distinguishes those elements).
  • Paul does not believe that the law was meant to transform the heart directly; rather it is meant to point/testify to the experience with the law’s God that transforms the heart.
  • The law’s specific stipulations guided Israel in their setting (e.g., agrarian, in the promised land, etc.), but just as those stipulations required new forms of obedience for their day, so the fuller revelation in Christ takes on new forms.
  • This fuller revelation in Christ, which Paul has undeniably experienced, has inaugurated (albeit not consummated) the promised messianic reign in a largely unexpected way (most dramatically, in a cruciform way), with equally unexpected consequences.
  • This fuller revelation in Christ makes available (as a foretaste of the coming world) the life-transforming experience with God through the Spirit that fulfills all the principles of the law (thus, for example, the new covenant’s greater circumcision of the heart to which earlier physical circumcision merely pointed; or Jesus’s summary of the law’s heart as love).
  • The law’s universal moral and spiritual principles, which God communicated to Israel in a specific context, can be recontextualized by the Spirit for all people of the new covenant, including ethnic Gentiles grafted into Israel’s heritage through following Jesus, Israel’s Messiah (here it must be acknowledged that we often lack consensus on what the universals are; I have offered elsewhere suggestions for discerning those; see e.g., http://www.craigkeener.org/how-i-love-your-law-ot-laws-in-context/; http://www.craigkeener.org/understanding-and-applying-ot-laws-today/; http://www.craigkeener.org/which-day-is-the-sabbath/).
  • The law testifies to the way of a personal relationship with God, as evidenced in the lives of Abraham, Moses, and others; its heart is more about God and his covenant love (e.g., Exod 34:4-7) than about its stipulations (though those stipulations remained crucial as part of God’s covenant with Israel at Sinai).
  • As part of Israel’s heritage and a continuing witness to the universal truth the Scriptures convey, even many of the law’s traditional stipulations remain valuable to those who remain Jewish by ethnic identity (e.g., Messianic Jews, such as Paul himself was, are fully within their rights to continue to express their Jewish heritage in this way).
  • Paul believes that to approach the law as a list of duties (even ones joyfully undertaken) rather than a witness to the way of faith in (and thus personal relationship with) God (Rom 3:27; 9:31-32), or apart from the enabling experience of the Spirit (8:2), cannot transform the identity (more controversially, I am inclined to add, “and never could”; I believe that Paul saw Deut 30 and other parts of the law testifying to divine rather than human transformation of those who walk with God, with the new covenant developing this transformative empowerment more deeply in light of Jer 31:31-34 and Ezek 36:25-27).
  • Treating the law’s stipulations as a means of demonstrating righteousness instead of depending on the divine favor and empowerment to which the law pointed in fact defies dependence on God’s favor and hence incurs condemnation. In this way, the law can even function as an instrument of divine judgment to those who miss God’s heart there.

Now, if you can figure out what such a set of views should be called, you are smarter than I. There are so many different permutations on various details on the scale between Luther and various New Perspective(s), with Reformed articulations often friendlier to continuing value for the law than some other views (especially Bultmann’s), that I find traditional ways of classifying views inadequate (even if they are necessary to provide some sort of handle on the spectrum).

I am noting this hastily constructed list because I am turning more of my attention back to Pauline studies now, and if I am wrong on some of these points, it will be helpful for me to learn that now before I publish more work on this subject! Nevertheless I remain certain that, given the range of perspectives now current on various details, there is almost no way to summarize a view without missing some nuancing valuable for this or that point of debate. For that I can only apologize in advance and hope to keep learning.