Paul, Jesus, and Christian Origins

"Jesus was bringing Israel's history to its climax; Paul was living in the light of that climax.  Jesus was narrowly focused on the sharp-edged, single task; Paul was celebrating the success of that task, and discovering its fruits in a thousand different ways and settings."

Now, here, finally in this last chapter, N.T. Wright answers the question we've all been waiting for since starting to read What Saint Paul Really Said.  Was Paul of Tarsus really the founder of Christianity?  Wright says "no."

A big issue within the study of Christian origins is if and how the legacy of the Christian church has any relation to the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  Put another way, if Jesus of Nazareth came back today, would he recognize his teachings and his ministry within his church?  Often the question is asked to imply the answer "no."

In many ways and in many places this critique of the church is accurate and deserved.  However, Wrights argument is that while the church may have a checkered past, it is not because Paul himself was the one who departed from the person of Jesus and the announcement of his good news.

On the surface, it may appear that Jesus message and ministry about the Kingdom of God while Paul's message and ministry focused on justification.  Yes, their vocabulary and major themes of their teaching may not be identical, but Wright very much sees Paul in continuity with Jesus; even if Paul didn't exactly replicate Jesus' ministry.

The reason why Paul may appear to go in a different direction than Jesus is because Jesus and Paul had two different callings and vocations.  Jesus came to announce and inaugurate the Kingdom of God and to fulfill God's promise to Israel.  Paul came to announce Jesus' success in bringing the Kingdom, and, because of that success, to announce God's blessing upon the gentiles as well.  Jesus came to announce and inaugurate the Kingdom.  Paul came to announce how Jew and gentile alike enter into that kingdom (i.e. how they become justified).

Thus, Paul builds on Jesus' message and does so in such a way that it can be understood as good news to the gentiles as well as the Jews.  Paul is an apostle to the gentiles; he is a missionary.  And like any good missionary he contextualizes the gospel to communicate effectively.  But this is a far cry, according to Wright, from those who accuse Paul of jettisoning or downplaying Jesus' message of the Kingdom altogether.

Paul's Gospel Then and Now

"One is not justified by faith by believing in justification by faith.  One is justified by faith by believing in Jesus."

"The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is Lord - Lord of the world, Lord of the cosmos, Lord of the earth, of the ozone layer, of whales and waterfalls, of trees and tortoises.  As soon as we get this right we destroy at a stroke the disastrous dichotomy that has existed in people's minds between 'preaching the gospel' on the one hand and what used to be called loosely 'social action' or 'social justice' on the other.  Preaching the gospel means announcing Jesus as Lord of the world; and unless we are prepared to contradict ourselves with every breath we take, we cannot make that announcement without seeking to bring that lordship to bear over every aspect of the world."

Chapter 9, the second-to-last chapter of What Saint Paul Really Said, is essentially a summary of much of the Material that N.T. Wright has been discussing.

Wright has sought all along to place the doctrine of justification within the gospel proclamation.  The proclamation of the good news (gospel) of Jesus, the crucified and risen king is what creates a new community of people who have come to faith in Jesus and who live their lives in allegiance to him.  The doctrine of justification then is what says that all who have this faith in Jesus, and all who give their allegiance to him by living lives of holiness, obedience, and justice, are a part of God's people regardless of social divisions.

Throughout, Wright has been running against the grain of the Reformation legacy which understood justification primarily in regards to soteriology (the study of salvation) and has been arguing instead that justification is about ecclesiology (the study of the church) (without going so far as to say that those things are completely separate),

The job of the church, the job of those who are 'justified' into a new community based on their common allegiance to Jesus, is to continue to incarnate the good news message of Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord into all areas of life.  By living lives of holiness, by a lifestyle characterized by the obedience of faith, but working for justice, building peace, caring for the environment, and, yes, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus, the church provides signs of hope in the present of the way things will be in the future.

Therefore, when the church gets its theology in the right order, when it understand justification in relationship both to the church and to the Gospel itself, the church gains clarity in proclaiming the whole gospel to the whole world.  And that is good news indeed.

God's Renewed Humanity

"I shall try to show then that Paul's vision of the renewal of humanity in Christ is not simply a one-dimensional ethic.  It is not simply a matter of 'getting saved' and then 'learning how to be have.'  It is a multi-textured vision, woven together to meet various specific needs, and promoted with all the energy that, Paul declared, his God had inspired him with."

What what does Paul's vision of the renewal of humanity in Christ involve?  That is the central question of chapter 8 in What St. Paul Really Said by N.T. Wright.  According to Wright, this involved several things:

1) Worship -  Worship of the one true God is at the center of the renewal of humanity.  This means setting aside all parody, imitation, and counterfeit 'gods' - anything by which humans look upon the power of God and instead of worshiping God worship the elements of the world.  We may expect Paul's critique of pagan idolatry along these lines (c.f. Romans 1:20-23) but the surprising twist that Wright points out is how Paul critiqued unbelieving Judaism along the same lines (which is Paul's focus in Romans 2).  Worshiping counterfeit gods leads to counterfeit humanity.  Therefore, Paul's vision of the renewed humanity means worshiping the true God, reflecting the true God, and thus becoming more truly and genuinely human in the process.

2) Resurrection - The age of the resurrection has begun with the death and resurrection of Jesus.  We are no longer living in the 'last days' awaiting God's defeat of evil.  Instead, we are living in the beginning of a new age in which Jesus and his way of the cross has already defeated the power of evil, sin, and death.

3) Holiness - As we await the day when God brings into completion the victory already won in Christ, those who have turned to worship the one true God are to lived transformed lives of holiness (c.f. Romans 12:1ff).  Growing in Christlikness in Paul's vision is not an optional add on, and yet at the same time Wright acknowledges that Paul was a realist.  Growth in holiness and progress in Christlike does not mean perfection.  So rather than a life of perfection, Paul's vision for the renewed humanity is a process in which worshiping the one true God and sharing in the sufferings of Christ leads to genuine humanness.  Of course, sharing in the sufferings of Christ means that holiness does not come cheap.

4) Love - The counterfeit gods of paganism and unbelieving Judaism lead to fracturing, not only in the lives of individuals but also between tribes, peoples, and groups.  Paul's vision of a new humanity therefore involves a new creation of a community shaped by love; agape love.  This is the love the overcomes social division and demonstrates Christ's victory over the principalities and powers.  This kind of love is a lifestyle, not an emotion.  It is a lifestyle that transcends social boundaries and forms a new community united in the worship of God.

5) Mission - Resurrection-informed worship resulting in lives of holiness and communities of love then lead into the mission of the church which is to proclaim, announce, and embody God's kingdom in the world.  This means following Jesus, the crucified and risen King, in daily life and announcing the gospel of King Jesus to every creature under heaven.

Paul's vision of the new humanity involves a life based on worship, defined by resurrection. committed to holiness, shaped by love, and dedicated to mission.  Thus, the new humanity made possible by Christ finds its fulfillment in a new vocation.  It's not only about being blessed, it's about being a blessing to others; which is the fulfillment of the call of Abraham from the start (Gen 12:1-3).

Justification and the Church

“In terms of the place of justification within Paul’s thought, I have already indicated that it cannot be put right at the center, since that place is already taken by the person of Jesus himself…”

As Wright has been saying all along throughout the book What Saint Paul Really Said, what Paul meant when he said “gospel” or “righteousness” doesn’t always correspond to what we mean when we use these words in the contemporary church.  It’s not that our usage is wrong or completely off course, just that there are subtle, yet important differences. 

The particular insight I want to bring out is Wright’s argument that justification language is eschatological.  Wright argues that “Justification in the first century was not about how someone might establish a relationship with God.  It was about God’s eschatological definition… of who was, in fact, a member of his people…. It was not so much about getting in or about staying in, as about how you could tell who was in.” 

In contemporary usage, justification may be used to talk about how a person comes into a relationship with God through Jesus.  Wright however, argues that Paul never uses the word justification to talk about how a person comes into a relationship with God.  Rather, Wright argues, that Paul instead outlines a process by which one comes into a covenantal relationship with God that involves such things as the Good News that Jesus is King is first proclaimed, then the spirit of God works on an individual’s heart, then the person comes to believe, join a church through baptism, and share in the church’s way of life.

Wright is reversing the order of how we think about justification.  It’s not so much about how one starts a relationship with Jesus.  It is rather how we tell who is already a part of the people of God.  It’s about how we can tell in the present who will be vindicated by God on the last days.  And the mark of how we tell who are a part of the people of God in the present, and who will be vindicated by God in the future, is faith.  We are justified by faith.  The way we can tell who is a member in God’s family is if they believe the good news that Jesus, the crucified and risen messiah, is King.  The way we can determine who will be vindicated by God in the last day is by their faith. 

For Saul the Pharisee, the badge, the mark, the identifier that determined if someone was a part of the people of God was circumcision.   Paul the Convert maintains that there is a special “mark” by which the people of God are identified; it’s just that he now substitutes circumcision with faith.  The people of God are no longer marked by common ancestry, but by common faith, i.e. true children of Abraham. 

I find myself following Wright along this path, and also wanting to add one more thing.  Yes, faith in messiah Jesus, the crucified and risen king, is a part of what demarcates a person as a member of God’s family.  But I also think that Paul’s understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit is part and parcel to this as well. 

In Genesis 17:10-11 circumcision is given to Abraham as a sign of God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants.  Thus, because of this sign, because of this seal, there was a very real and obvious way that one could tell who was a part of the covenant that God made with Abraham. 

Paul builds on this in Romans 5:11 where he refers to Abraham’s circumcision as “seal of the righteousness that he had by faith.”  Abraham had faith, and God gave him the sign of circumcision as a seal (a marker, an identifier) of one who has faith.     

Elsewhere in Paul’s writings Paul applies the same word “seal” to the Holy Spirit. 

Eph:1:13 – “In him also when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.” 

Eph 4:30 – “And do not grieve the Holy Spirt of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption.” 

2 Cor 1:21-22 – “It is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us, by putting his seal on us and giving us his Spirit in our hearts as a first installment.” 

So yes, we are justified by faith, and therefore faith in Christ is the "seal" by which we can know in the present who will be vindicated by God in the future.  But I find the connection with the Holy Spirit as a “seal” also helpful.  It’s another piece of the puzzle.  Is one’s life marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control?  Might those also be marks, identifiers, “seals” that identify in the present the children of God?

This seems to me to provide a biblical and theological guidepost for the church in 21^st century America; a context where no community, save those that are extremely isolated or policed, is homogenous.  Justification by faith alone, and an appreciation for the fruits of the Spirit in the life of believers, provide a platform for unity within the church; a unity for which Jesus prayed in John 17:20-23. 

As Wright says, Justification has more to do with ecclesiology than soteriology.  

Good News for Israel

"For a reader of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Jewish scriptures, 'the righteousness of God' would have one obvious meaning:  God's own faithfulness to his promises, to the covenant.  God's 'righteousness', especially in Isaiah 40-55, is that aspect of God's character because of which he saves Israel, despite Israel's perversity and lostness.  God has made promises; Israel can trust those promises.... At the heart of God's 'righteousness' is his covenant with Israel, the covenant through which he will address and solve the problem of evil in and for the whole world."

If my memory is correct, the first words from Rick Warren's A Purpose Driven Life are "It's not about you."  These would be apt words to open up Wright's 6th chapter of What Saint Paul Really Said on the topic of the righteousness of God.  

Righteousness is not about you.  Righteousness is about God.  It means that God is faithful and trustworthy.  It means that God has integrity.  It means that when God makes a promise, God will back up those words with action.  This is "Good News for Israel" as the chapter is entitled.  It means that God will act to redeem Israel from her exile.  It means that Israel will be saved and redeemed from the hands of her oppressor.  It means that evil will be defeated.  And it means all this because God is righteous.  

We could restate this according to the understanding that righteousness means "right-relationships" according to the terms of the covenant between two parties.  God has established his covenant with Israel, therefore, for God to be "righteous" means that he acts according to the terms of the covenant.  

Within the span of this short, 15-page chapter, Wright unpacks the law-court setting in which "righteousness" language is derived as well as looks at key passages from Paul's letters that capture Paul's thinking on this topic.  It would be tempting to quote a lot more of Wright's words from the chapter to illustrate what he is talking about, but Warren's phrase, as applied to righteousness, seems sufficient; "It's not about you."  It's not about a certain moral quality that people are given.  It's not about any kind of slight of hand by which God no longer sees human wickedness and idolatry.  Rather, righteousness is a attribute and characteristic of God.  It's is who God is.  God is righteous.  

This has tremendous pastoral implications because it provides the assurance that God can be trusted to do the things God said he will do.  God may not do them in the ways his people expect; and certainly a suffering servant messiah was not expected.  So yes, we must be prepared for God to act outside of our human-minded categories.  But when God says he will redeem his people, he will.  When God says he will forgive sins, he will.  When God says that the lion and the lamb will lie down together, they will.  When God says death has lost its sting, it has.  And not only will this things happen one day in the future, but in the Christ Jesus these signs mark that the reign of God have already begun.  

And none of this is because I've become good, or because God sees me through "blood stained glasses" or because God simply chooses to ignore my sin.  It is all because God is righteous and acts out of right relationships toward sinful and broken humanity because of God's great covenant of love for all of creation.  

This is a God I can worship.  This is a God I can draw near to.  Not because I've somehow become good in the moral or the forensic sense (though certainly I do strive for obedience), but because God is good. 

"No one is good but God alone," Luke 18:19.  And that is why the righteousness of God is good news for Israel and all of humanity.  

Good News for the Pagans

"The direction of Paul's message was confrontation with paganism; he had good news for them, but it was good news which undermined their worldview and replaced it with an essentially Jewish one, reworked around Jesus."

Chapter 5 of What Saint Paul Really Said is a dense chapter, but my time is short and so I'm only going to pick up on one thread indicated by the quote above.

I'm sure I could look it up, but I don't know off the top of my head what Wright's interaction and relationship with Karl Barth was/is.  At any rate, overtones of Barth's dialectical theology (with it's emphasis on God's revelation) are present in Wright's presentation of Paul.  This is especially brought out later in the chapter when Wright says that the good news is "not the sort of good news that told them (i.e. the pagans) they were more or less all right as they were, but the sort of good news which told them that, though they were at present going about things in a totally wrong way, the God who made them loved them and longed to remake them."

So yes, the gospel or good news demands repentance.  Particularly, it demands the kind of repentance where one orients one's life around the person of Jesus and his way of the cross and resurrection, which is God's ultimate revelation to the world.

But as Christians, I don't think we ought to read this chapter as pointing the finger at "those pagans" who are somehow other than us; that it is "those pagans" who must come to see their worldviews undermined by the good news.  Rather, if we take seriously Wright's basic premise of the book, that we 21st Century Christians need to in some way, shape, or form hear afresh Paul's message within his 1st century Jewish context, then we need to ask in what ways have "pagan" thought forms infiltrated our understanding of the gospel.  The question then becomes, how do we as 21st Century, American Christians find our worldviews being undermined by the narrative proclamation of King Jesus, the crucified and risen messiah?

Informed by my Anabaptist heritage, I would begin my answer to this question by saying that at times the church has in fact marginalized Jesus.  The church has worshiped Christ as savior but has neglected to follow Jesus as Lord.  At the extreme, the church has simply baptized the pagan ways of Caesar and the Pax Romana rather than heeding the call to pick up one's cross and follow this rabbi from Nazareth.

Wright's scholarship is thus helpful and corrective even (perhaps especially) for Christians.  Like Barth, Wright helps us understand the good news that Paul proclaimed as the revelation of God that sets a question mark against all humanity, for it is in Jesus that we hear both God's "yes" and God's "no."  Therefore, we all must find that place in which we are first confronted by the good news so that we might be "transformed by the renewing of our minds" (Romans 12:2).

Paul and Jesus

"(Paul) has spied new meaning of the word 'God', because the person he has firmly in view is Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and risen one.  Paul has taken the word 'God' itself and has filled it with new content.  Or rather, he would say, he has discovered what its true content always was."

"...at the heart of Paul's theology and indeed gospel, is the news that the one true God consists, through and through, of self-giving love."

It seems to me that Chapter 4 in NT Wight's book, What Saint Paul Really Said, brushes the surface of what would have been an critically important conversation among Paul and his first century Jewish counterparts.  Particularly, it has to do with the relationship between Jesus and monotheism.  Was Jesus divine, and if so how?  Wright argues that Paul did think Jesus was divine and that he did so in a way that maintained the integrity of Jewish monotheism.

But I must say that there is a lot left unsaid in this chapter, and I'm not always sure how to fill in the blanks.  I'll gladly attribute that to my own ignorance as well as the fact that Wright is only giving very brief treatment to this topic (and I'm sure if you want to read Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God you could go deeper).  All in all, I think the main thrust of this chapter is to say what the author of the book of Hebrews says in its opening verses; that in these last days God has spoken most clearly and definitively through his Son, and as Wright interprets Paul on this matter, this is more a clarification of the one God of Israel rather than a modification.

Wright points us to three key scriptures in this chapter to help us understand how Paul placed Jesus within Jewish monotheism.  I'm just going to mention the main connecting point that Wright makes with each, realizing that a lot more needs to be said.

First, Wright connects Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 8:1-6 with the opening of the shema in Deuteronomy 6:4 to show that Paul's language of the One God, the Father, and One Lord, Jesus Christ, draw upon the same language as the key monotheistic passage from the Hebrew Scriptures.  Wright argues that Paul isn't departing from Jewish monotheism but rather has discovered something new about it.

Second, Wright connects Paul's words in Philippians 2:5-11 with Isaiah 40-55.  With this connection we see Jesus linked both with Isaiah's suffering servant and with the one to whom every knee shall bow.  Therefore, to say that every knee shall bow at the name of Jesus does not mean that God shares God's glory with another person or god but rather that the very definition of 'God' includes Christ and the suffering of cross, which is the expression of self-giving love by which God redeems God's people.  

Third, Wright references Colossians 1:15-20.  This poem is an example of Jewish monotheistic poetry in which the one true God acts both as the creator of the world and the redeemer of Israel.  In this poem from Colossians, the stress remains on the one true God who creates the world and redeem Israel, but adds the claim that this one true God is now seen clearly in Jesus.  

As I reflect on this chapter, I have two lingering thoughts.  First, I'm not greatly concerned about the topic.  Starting with Paul, the early church fathers, and throughout the history of the church, the church has articulated both the truth and the mystery of the doctrine of the trinity.  I don't find the need to say any more about this.  Sorting out the doctrine of the trinity was the number one issue for the early church, but it just isn't today.  So while I affirm the doctrine of the trinity, it has already been worked out so the question is now, what do we do with it?  Second, I can certainly understand why it was such and important topic for Paul.  And I can certainly admit that, because the issue doesn't have the same urgency for me and my context today as it would have for Paul and his back then, I easily gloss over the very important connections that Paul is making in how he quotes and alludes to the Hebrew scriptures.

So good on you, Paul.  You tackled a critically important issue by embedding Jesus within the framework of monotheism.  The early church was indebted to your work and carried it on to where it needed to go.  But the question that I am interested in, and the question that presents itself to the church today is, given that Jesus is divine and that Jesus is Lord and that the one true God of Israel and savior of the world is revealed in Jesus, so what?  It certainly can't stop at an idea or an ideology to be enforced, but must move out into a way of life defined by the self-giving love of the cross by those who confess this to be true.  And I believe the other chapters in the book will address some of these more pressing issues.

So yes, an important, but brief, chapter in terms of the study of Paul.  But not may favorite.

Herald of the King

"The story of God and the world, (Paul) believed, was focused on and encapsulated within the story of Jesus of Nazareth.  This story was 'gospel', good news, for all the world. I want now to outline, step by step, the core of the story as far as Paul was concerned.  His announcement was that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth had been raised from the dead; that he was thereby proved to be Israel's Messiah; that he was thereby installed as Lord of the whole world.  Or to put it yet more compactly: Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, is Lord."

"(The Gospel) is not, then, a system of how people get saved.  The announcement of the gospel results in people being saved... But 'the gospel' itself, strictly speaking, is the narrative proclamation of King Jesus... When a herald makes a royal proclamation, he says 'Nero (or whoever) has become emperor.'  He does not say 'If you would like to have an experience of living under and emperor, you might caret to try Nero.'  The proclamation is an authoritative summons to obedience - in Paul's case, to what he calls 'the obedience of faith'."

We don't understand what the world "gospel" means.  That's NT Wright's argument in Chapter 3 of What Saint Paul Really Said.  I agree.  But maybe to nuance that statement a bit more, the word "gospel" itself has come to take on so much extra meaning over the two centuries of the Christian church and Christian theology that it's easy to loose track of what Paul really meant when he used that word.  While much of this extra meaning has come as a result of faithful men (mostly, but also some women) trying to appropriate the message of the "gospel" to their time and place, it is important that we not allow the contextual appropriations to replace the meaning of the word itself.  Otherwise we eventually get several steps removed from "What Saint Paul Really Said", as the title of the book suggests.

The word which we translate as gospel in English is the Greek word euangelion.  Other English translations could include "good news" or "announcement" or "message" etc.  To help us understand Paul's use of the word euangelion, Wright points us to two critical pieces of New Testament background.

First, there is the Jewish background for the term.  Greek translations of the Jewish scriptures use euangelion in several key places, including, for example:
      Isaiah 40:9   "Get up to a high mountain,
                         O Zion, herald of good tidings (euangelizomenos)
                         Lift up your voice with strength,
                         O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings (euangelizomenos

      And Isaiah 52:7  "How beautiful upon the mountains
                                are the feet of the messenger who announces (euangelizomenos) peace.

Both of these examples use the Greek root from which we get "gospel" to signify the announcement, the proclamation, of something good - hence, good news.    In the context of the prophet Isaiah, these passages and others are connected with the good news proclamation of God returning to the people Israel and ending their long-endured exile.

Second, there is the Greco-Roman background for the term.  In this context, euangelion was the word used when announcing the "good news" of the birth of an emperor, the enthronement of an emperor, a great military victory of the emperor, etc.  In other words, it was a political term used to announce something that would have been considered "good news" to the citizens of the empire.

With this background in mind, we see how Paul's use of the word euangelion subverts the Greco-Roman use of the word.  It undercuts the "good tidings" of Caesar by applying it to the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth who thus fulfills the prophetic hopes of Israel and is also enthroned as Lord over the entire world, including the emperor.

Euangelion is not a neutral word that simply seeks to denote a personal religious experience or inner faith.  It is a term that established a new world order in Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah and King.  It's the proclamation of the good news of King/Emperor Jesus.  And while Wright doesn't get into this, I would also add that it is simultaneously a proclamation of the distinct nature of Jesus' Kingdom in contrast to that of Caesar's.

This, as Wright helps us understand, is what Paul meant by word euangelion/gospel/good news/glad tidings.  And it was this announcement, first and foremost, that changes the hearts and minds of people to establish God's reign here on earth as it is in heaven.

Questions:
How might this understanding of "gospel" change Christian preaching?
How might it change Christian education and catechism?
How would it change evangelism?
What historical factors and developments led the church away from the empire-subverting understanding of "gospel"?
To many (including myself) Wright offers a welcome corrective to an individualistic and overly-spiritualized understanding of the word, but what dangers might exist in overcompensating?


PS:  A note about the attached image.  It's a design by an artist named Jim Lepage who I've come across, and I find his work illuminating and inspiring.  It's from a series called "Word Biblical Design" in which he created one image per each biblical book.  I have this image for 2 Samuel framed and hanging in my office, and I believe it, along with this chapter, further illuminates how Paul (and for that matter Jesus) re-appropriates the idea of "good news" to communicate the truly different type of King that Jesus is, and the world-redefining "gospel" that we have come to believe.  

Saul the Persecutor; Paul the Convert

"Not only was he a Jew in a world run by pagan goyim, Gentiles, not only was he a Pharisee in a world where (from the Pharisee's point of view) many Jews were seriously compromised with aspects of paganism, he was a Shammaite, a hard-line Pharisee - what we today would call a militant right-winger."

"Jews like Saul of Tarsus were not interested in an abstract, timeless, ahistorical system of salvation.  They were not even primarily interested in, as we say today, 'going to heaven when they died'... They were interested in the salvation which, they believed, the one true God had promised to his people Israel."


The basic argument in Chapter 1 of What Saint Paul Really Said is that if we are going to understand Paul's Christian theology correctly, we need to understand Saul's Jewish theology first.  So in order to do this Wright spends this chapter giving definition to Saul's Jewish identity and theology.

Within the Pharisaical Judaism of Saul's day there were two main schools of thought; those who followed Rabbi Hillel and those who followed Rabbi Shammai.  Hillel was lenient while Shammai was strict.  Saul was a Shammaite Pharisee, and a zealous one at that.  As such, Saul was filled with righteous anger at the pagan influences that corrupted and compromised his people and his faith.  Saul and his colleagues were therefore willing to go to extreme measures to protect God, Torah, and the Temple, and saw themselves as agents to bring about God's holy revolution, defeat evil, and usher in the messianic age when God's righteous king would come and establish God's reign.

Wright goes on to stress that Saul's hope for the coming messianic age was not for some distant time, nor was it a "spiritual" age.  Rather it was the in-breaking of God's reign within history in which the nations would be judged and Israel would be vindicated.  It wasn't about achieving salvation through works and good deeds.  It wasn't even about salvation as we Christians tend to think of salvation.  It was about the historical fulfillment of the prophesies of scripture that foresaw a day when God would redeem Israel by ending her long-endured exile and oppression at the hands of pagans.

When Saul encountered the resurrected Jesus on the Road to Damascus, his "conversion" (there's a lot of debate about if Saul truly experienced conversion or just came to a new understanding of his Jewish faith) was that he came into a new understanding of who Jesus was.  To Saul the persecutor, Jesus had just been one more compromiser who didn't overthrow the Romans and who blasphemed against Torah and Temple.  But after encountering the Resurrected Jesus, Paul the convert came to see Jesus as the messiah and the one through who God is redeeming not only Israel, but the entire world.  

This "conversion" was obviously a big shift for Saul because it meant a completely new understanding of how God was going to act and bring about the new messianic age.  It was not through war and military victory that God overthrew the pagans and defeated sin and evil.  Rather it was through the cross and resurrection of Jesus that God defeated sin and evil and even death itself.  And that this death and resurrected represented the dawn of the messianic age (even while sin and evil continue to exist) for all people, Jew and gentile alike.

I believe this has several implications for ministry.  First, while we followers of Jesus still look forward to the day when God's complete reign will be fully established rather than just in part, Paul the convert is conscious of how God's reign is already being established in this present age through Jesus (though obviously this looks quite different than Saul the persecutor imagined).  We too need to open up our imaginations to understand salvation in more than just futuristic terms.

Second, it invites us into the company of cross-bearers rather than cross-imposers.  Saul the persecutor sought to impose the reign of God through religious coercion and even violence when necessary.  Paul the convert, having been transformed by the self-giving, self-emptying way of Jesus and his cross, laid down the stones that he cast at the early church (and others) and picked up his own cross so that he might be a servant of Jesus and a servant to others in announcing good news.  We learn from the tragic lessons of Saul/Paul's own life that how we bear witness is as important as what we bear witness to.  To say the least, this steers us away from the path of religious extremism as a viable option for followers of Jesus.

Third, it's the church's job to witness to the reign of God; the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, non-violent, shalom and well being for all creation that is made possible in Jesus.  The church, as the new community of redeemed people witnesses to the fulfillment of God's promises and Jesus while living into the vision of God's reign in all we do.

Questions:
1) Are there examples that come to mind of how and when the church has fallen into the thinking and approach of Saul the persecutor?
2) What do you make of Wright characterizing Saul as a "militant right-winger"?
3)  Is it accurate to say that both Saul the Persecutor and Paul the Convert had a sense of being an agent for God's reign?  If so, how would Saul and Paul have understood that differently?  

What Saint Paul Really Said

At only 182 pages, this is a mere essay by N.T. Wright standards.  This book by the preeminent scholar on Paul is an excellent introduction to Wright's understanding of the ministry and message of Saint Paul of Tarsus.  It's this book, published in 1997, that eventually grew into the 2-volume, 1,700-page magnum ops that Wright just released entitled Paul and the Faithfulness of God.  If you don't have the time, energy, or desire to wade through 1,700 pages (though I am sure they are wonderful pages), this "pamphlet" will give you the outline of what you need to know about Wright's thoughts on Paul.  It's much more accessible for busy pastors, and I would venture to guess no less game-changing.

Essentially, this book represents Wright's attempt to rescue Paul from the western, individualistic categories with which he is often interpreted by the contemporary church.  These categories grow out of the questions and context of the reformation.  And while reformation theologians may have been interpreting and contextualizing Paul for their day and time, Wright is more interested in understanding Paul's thought as it was in his day and his context as opposed to how the reformers understood Paul.

Chapter 1 gives a 10,000 ft overview of Pauline scholarship going back to the turn of the 20th century with scholars like Albert Scweitzer who opened and advanced studies that attempted to place Paul within his original Jewish context under Roman occupation within the mid-first century A.D.  Then with E.P. Sanders' release of Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977 a "revolution" took place according to Wright.  Sanders argued that the Judaism of Paul's day was not a works-righteousness faith as it is so often stereotyped.  Rather it was a covenantal faith in which keeping the law was one's response to having already been brought into God's covenant people.

What Saint Paul Really Said is Wrights contribution into this century-long conversation that seeks to faithfully understand Paul in his day so that we might faithfully apply him to our day.  Throughout the book Wright unpacks Paul the person, his message, his Jewish context, his Roman context, his understanding of justification, and his vision for God's people.

I should say a special note of thanks to my grandfather for giving me this book.  It's been on my shelf for a number of years, ever since my grandfather really retired from ministry.  He was cleaning out his book shelf and offered for me to take any that looked interesting.  I chose this title (among others) mainly for the author, knowing nothing about the book itself.  At the time I had no idea I had such a jewel on my hands, but what can I say?  Thanks, grandpa!