"Paul" in a Fresh Perspective - Chapter Five Summary

This is part five in an ongoing series of chapter summaries of N.T. Wright’ book, Paul in a Fresh Perspective. Today we begin a new section of the book on structures and look in more depth at chapter 5: Rethinking God.

In chapter five, Wright begins by briefly recapping the conclusions of the previous four chapters which provide the background to Paul’s worldview and thought by reminding the reader that “Paul had in mind an essentially historical and sequential reading of scripture, in which the death and resurrection of the Messiah formed the unexpected but always intended climax of God’s lengthy plan.” (p. 85) He then makes a turn to explain that for us to understand Paul’s theology, and thus to truly get inside his head and thoughts about God, we need to not only understand the world into which he was set loose by Christ, but also the structures and beliefs that sustained and held him in, and in tension with that world.

For Wright, Paul had a distinctively Jewish theological outlook, which may seem somewhat foreign to many Christians who are products of the enlightenment as much as we are products of the gospel. Wright makes the point that systematic theology, as is understood in the Christian sense, was not a concern for the Jews of Paul’s day in the same way that we understand it today. For the Jews, Wright suggests that there are only three main concerns in the theology of Paul’s era: the first is Monotheism (the idea that God is one, and only one), the second is Election (the idea that God has called for himself a chosen people through which and to which he reveals his wisdom, and will), and third, a logical consequence of the first two, Eschatology which is concerned with the question of how the one God’s promises to his one chosen people will be worked out to bless the world.  Paul does not abandon these theological structures that define him, but rather Paul’s thought can best be understood as a redefinition of these structures around the Messiah and the Spirit.

Dispensing with further introductory remarks, Wright then dives headlong into the central topic of this chapter, namely exploring how Paul redefined the idea of Jewish style monotheism around the understanding of a God who is revealed not only as Father, but also as Son and Spirit.

Monotheism: The Jewish Roots

Not all monotheisms are created equal (pantheism and epicureanism are good examples) and the type of monotheism that was practiced by the ancient Jews and that was adapted by the earliest Christians was what Wright identifies as creational and covenantal monotheism (harkening back to the thesis of chapter two): “The one God of Israel made the world and has remained in dynamic relationship with it; and this one God, in order to further his purposes within and for that word, has entered into covenant with Israel in particular.” (p. 86) This type of monotheism is more seriously concerned with the problem of evil than other sorts as, “Jewish analyses of evil regularly focus on idolatry…Idolatry inevitably, in such analyses, leads to the failure of humans to reflect the image of God, that is, the failure to be genuinely human: this means ‘missing the mark’, hamartia, in other words, ‘sin’.” (p. 88)

Jewish monotheism had already, by the time of Paul, developed ways of speaking of the action of the one God within Israel and the World:

·      A God who speaks and things happen

·      A God who gives life

·      A God who promised to pour out his spirit upon the world

·      A God who had promised that his glory would dwell in the temple

·      A God who created in wisdom and then continually revealed his wisdom to Israel

·      A God who supremely revealed his way, will and wisdom to Israel through the Torah.

“It’s a sign of Paul’s intention to be and remain a firm Jewish-style monotheist that he draws upon thee specific traditions and develops his view of Jesus and the Spirit in dialogue, sometimes polemical dialogue, with them. telos gar nomu Christos: The Messiah is both the goal and the end of the Torah.” (p. 90)

It is fair to say then, that for Wright, Paul is every bit as Jewish as his contemporaries with regards to how he views monotheism in the broader theological categories. Drifting neither to the nihilism of Epicureanism nor the glossy denial of suffering that is a trademark of Pantheism. But Paul was not merely a Jewish monotheist – he was also a Christian.

Monotheism and Christology

And being a Christian means that Paul has to also make that understanding of Jesus as Messiah and Lord (implied YHWH) fit into his Jewish monotheistic framework. To demonstrate how Paul does this Wright looks at key passages in Romans 10:5-8, Philippians 2:6-11, 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:15-20 to affirm not only that Paul saw Jesus as the divine co-equal of the Father but he did so in a distinctly Jewish way.

Paul’s use of Kyrios in Romans 10 in particular to refer to Jesus was a bold statement of his high Christology: “Paul reads this passage [Deuteronomy 30 as quoted in Romans 10], a prediction of the ultimate return from exile, as a passage about what God has now done, not through Torah, but through the Messiah.” (p. 92) While Paul’s Christ hymn of Philippians 2 is an explicit statement in which Paul communicates that the human being known as Jesus of Nazareth was/is one and the same with the eternal God and who gave “fresh expression to what that equality meant by incarnation, humiliating suffering, and death.” (p. 93)

Paul’s teaching on eating food sacrificed to idols in 1 Corinthians 8:6 demonstrates probably most clearly of all that Paul still holds to the mindset of a Jewish monotheist. When he tells his Corinthian congregants that ‘of course idols have no real significance or power because we know that God is one’, he affirms in a pagan setting that the default Christian understanding of God is rooted in Jewish monotheism. Moreover he does so by proclaiming so in echoes of the Shema. (p. 94)

Colossians 1 of course, as Wright has explored earlier in chapter 2, is a classic expression of Jewish monotheism whereby Jesus is placed in the middle of a description on creation and redemption in a poetic structure that draws on both Genesis 1 and Proverbs 8 for inspiration.

Monotheism and The Spirit

The place of the Son within the structures of Jewish monotheism is only the first problem that Paul has to tackle though. He also needs to develop a theology of the Spirit that comports to his idea of what it means for God to be one. Wright points to the way Paul speaks of the Spirit as sent by God in the same way he speaks of the Son being sent by the father. The implied equality between the two when he has already worked so hard to set the Son up as being co-equal to the Father gives us a good picture of how Paul thinks of the Spirit. To further the point, Wright draws out the way Paul reuses the exodus motif in describing the new work of God in Christ and how the Spirit, in the retelling of the story of liberation, takes the place of God’s Shekinah Glory as the children of God (now being the church, and not ethnic Israel) are led out of bondage and into the promised land of new creation (Wright is careful to once again, as he frequently does, note that the destination for believers in new creation and not heaven as is so often mis-told in Christianity).  (p. 98)

Wright then turns his attention to 1 Corinthians 12 and Paul’s discourse on the gifts of the Spirit in the Church, where he notes that Paul’s talk about the unity that comes with the Spirit is set up as a contrast to the pagan (poly-theist) expression of religiosity where the different voices clamour over and against each other for attention. And yet surprisingly, for a traditional Jewish monotheist, Paul does not speak of uniformity but diversity within the unity of the Spirit. Paul even gives us a positively Trinitarian description of that diversity with the wonderful statement in verses 4-6 of that passage when he says: "There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.” “The unity and diversity which the church must exhibit in its worship is grounded in and modelled on that unity in diversity which Paul simply names without further argument or discussion, as Spirit, Lord and God.” (p. 100)

Central to Wright’s thesis regarding Paul’s monotheistic outlook on things is his understanding that Paul saw the completed work of Christ on the cross as a new experience of the exodus story. “Paul believed that, just as Israel’s God had been revealed in a new way when fulfilling his promises in the exodus, so now this same God had been revealed in a new way, a full and final way, in fulfilling his new-Exodus promises by his son and his Spirit.” (p. 102)

Wright also makes the point that the polemical targets of Paul’s redefined monotheism are not, as many have thought and taught, the Jews, but rather the polytheistic pagan culture of his day and locale. In the end thought, what may have mattered most of all for Paul is that the redefined monotheism (which we now would call Trinitarianism) of his theology worked itself out in the life and ministry of the church. The way the church was organized, the way the church prayed, the very way the church ordered and executed it’s mission was a by-product of the foundational belief in the One God who revealed himself in three persons, Father Son and Holy Spirit.

In the next chapter, Wright takes on the touchy subject of Paul’s doctrine of Election and what it meant to be part of God’s chosen people in light of what it means to be in Christ, both for the Jew and the Gentile.