Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God– Part Sixty Four

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:52 pm by Ben Witherington

Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God– Part Sixty Four 2015-03-13T22:52:11-04:00 Ben Witherington

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On p. 1095 Tom begins his discussion of two important topics when it comes to eschatology— ethics and ethnics, as he puts it, the latter having to do with the future of Israel. I think he is right that Paul is the first Jewish Christian to have to think through what these categories would look like between the time when Messiah first came and his return. Jesus, for example, says nothing about how Gentiles would fit into the people of God after his Ascension but before the parousia (and Tom is right that this is a good reason NOT to conclude that the Gospels simply reflect the later life and issues of the Christian church in the last third of the first century A.D.).

I am with Tom on the contention that theology necessarily implies ethics, for example, a commitment to one God, implies avoiding the worship of idols, an ethical matter. Tom repeats approvingly, on p. 1097 Schnelle’s dictum that when God accepts a person, they are accepted unconditionally, but not without consequences. The problem with this dictum is that there is always an implied condition— namely that one continue in the faith, working out one’s salvation that God has been working in. Of course this requires ongoing grace of God, so that no one could ever say it was accomplished on the sole basis of human effort much less work’s righteousness, but real faith not only implies works, necessitates works, it enables it, or as I like to put it ‘faith works’. I am in full agree with Tom that all that Paul says about ethics is directed toward and in relationship to the whole believing community. Modern individualistic ethics and a call for individual moral athletes is not part of Paul’s purpose or emphasis. Most of Paul’s imperatives are indeed plural, or as Tom puts, ethics is a team sport! Tom refers us to Richard Hays’ fine Moral Vision of the NT which insists rightly on a tight integration of Paul’s theology and ethics. Just so. Paul is not throwing out an ethical grab bag of ideas at the end of his otherwise theological letters.

In answer to why God didn’t simply bring about the resurrection of believers and the new creation immediately after the resurrection of Jesus Tom’s view of Paul’s answer (p. 1098) is interesting— “Paul’s answer was deeply humanizing: the one God did it this way in order to enable the humans who would share in the running of his new creation to develop the character they would need for that ultimate task.”

Again, Tom is absolutely right to reject the old Schweitzerian formula, still touted today by his latter day disciples (e.g. Allison, Ehrman etc.) that the ethics of the NT reflects and depends upon a wrong-headed belief in an imminent parousia that never came imminently. “For Paul what mattered was primarily something that had happened, namely the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Spirit…when I speak of eschatological ethics I refer not to an ethic determined by a sense that the world was about to end but to a sense of human vocation shaped equally by what had recently happened and what would one day happen.” (p. 1098). This is exactly right. 1 Cor. 7.29-31 does not say ‘the time is short’ it says ‘the time has been shortened’ by the eschatological events which were already in play, such that the schema of this world with its institutions was ALREADY passing away. The usual distinctions between the indicative (theology) and the imperative (ethics) are seen as inadequate but they do respond in a Jewish context to the relationship between election and keeping Torah as a response. The problem in using this schema for analyzing Paul is that there is still theology in terms of parousia to come as well as work to be done. There is, for example, a tight inner weaving of theology and ethics in Romans, for example. Instead of indicative and imperative Schnelle suggests transformation and participation as nearer the mark. Tom is right that Paul’s ethic is deeply grounded in Scripture, but oddly he fails to mention how deeply indebted it is also to the Jesus tradition, especially in Romans 12ff. It has some connections with Greco-Roman ethics as well, but not to the degree of debt of these two other sources of material. In order to hold theology and ethics together, Tom wants to talk about “the eschatological and behavioral aspect of the redefined election…rooted in Paul’s revised monotheism”. (p. 1100). The new creation has been launched but not yet fully consummated and so the ethics reflect both this already and this not yet.

Christians then are to live knowing what time it is— namely the period of the overlap of the ages. The age to come has already dawned and Christians are to live with that awareness that they have been rescued out of this present evil age. They are not to let this world squeeze them into its mold. Rather they are to live out of a (partially) transformed or renewed mind.

On pp. 1102-03 Tom wants to insist that in one sense resurrection has already happened to the believer, and so when he is asked to calculate himself dead to sin and alive to God, this latter is not just about considering the fact that one day he will be resurrected. Tom says, if resurrection in some sense has not already in part happened to the believer, then all these exhortations to a radical change in behavior are asking for the impossible. While I take his point on this, what is not the case is that Paul associates that ‘being made alive’ with water baptism. No, water baptism is the emblem of the burial of the old self. The being made alive happens in and through the Spirit, and that is not conveyed by, in, or with the water. One needs to keep steadily in view that baptism is like circumcision the sign of the covenant, and as such the sign of the cutting off, not the grafting in. So with circumcision it is a sign of the oath curse— ‘if you do not keep the covenant, I will cut you and your descendants off’ and what better symbol of this than an act applied to the organ of generation? Similarly, Paul says we have been buried in baptism, not raised in baptism, and the rising to newness of life is surely a reference (as a future tense verb) to the future resurrection, which present transformation by the Spirit is only a down payment, a foretaste. Comparisons with Col.3 can be overdrawn. There Paul does refer to present transformation as a sort of ‘being raised to life with the Messiah’ but this should not be read back into Romans 6. What is true about both Col. 3 (see p. 1103) and Rom. 6 is that Paul is convinced the believer has ‘stripped off the old nature, complete with its patterns of behavior, and ‘you have put on the new, which is being renewed in the image of the creator’. It is that internal being renewed that Paul affirms as already happening in the believer, though not to his physical body. True as well it is Jesus’ resurrection that has brought about this change, along with the sending of the Spirit to his people. Tom points to Col. 2.11-12 as the basis for his sort of reading of Col. 3 as once again about baptism, but in fact what Col. 2.11-12 says is that they were raised through their faith, not by means of baptism. Probably what Paul is saying there is we were buried with Christ (in him), and were raised with Him’ not ‘in baptism’ but ‘in Him’. When he wants to talk about what actually happens in us, he says the raising with him happens through faith (which is certainly not the same thing as baptism– see my commentary on Colossians pp. 156-57).

On p. 1104 Tom goes on to stress that believers are ‘in Christ’ and that this is the basis for the call to imitate Christ, not in some superficial mimicking, but by living self-sacrificial lives ala Phil. 2.4-11. They are to have the same mindset as Christ, and this should lead to following his pattern of behavior. Tom is right as well that one of the goals of the ethics enunciated is to unify the body of Christ— sin divides the body, the fruit of the Spirit, and Christ like behavior unifies it. On p. 1106 Tom is right to stress that the kingdom for Paul is present and future, and more particularly the Messiah’s kingdom is now, and it will be turned over to the Father later (1 Cor.15). The current nature of the Kingdom is seen in a saying like Rom.14.17. Christ’s res. is the crucial factor determining the believers status and goal, but it is the Spirit which enables the believer to turn that status into behavior. There is a crucial point at the bottom of this page” “when Paul speaks of the fruit of the Spirit, in contradistinction to the ‘works of the flesh’ he is not talking of things that happen automatically… Part of the mystery of the Spirit’s work… is that that work does not cancel out human moral effort, including thought, will, decision and action. Rather it makes them all possible. It opens up a new kind of freedom and offers help, encouragement, and companionship”.

It needs to be kept steadily in view that Tom’s view of the new covenant is that it is the renewed old covenant. And therefore, the law that Paul talks about as the Law of Christ, is not a new law, but rather the messianically redefined old one. The problem of course with this is among other things the Sermon on the Mount, which not only intensifies some of the OT commandments, but offers some that are at odds with OT commandments, for example the prohibition of divorce, of murder, of oaths, and we could go on about no more food laws and no more sabbath keeping either. The renewed covenant model of what is going on in Paul’s discussion of the Law simply does not have a broad enough explanatory power to do justice to all of Christ’s or Paul’s ethic, frankly.

Of course it is true that there is overlap between ethics in the new covenant and the old one on many particular imperatives. This is hardly a surprise since God’s character and what he expects of the character of his people has not really changed just because Christ has come. And yes, it is also true that the real intention and heart of the old covenant— loving God and neighbor, can be said to be fulfilled in Christ and in the new covenant. But if it is fulfilled, then a covenant is over and done with, just as when a contract is fulfilled and completed.

So when Tom endorses E.P. Sanders statement that what happens with Paul and the law is that he simply denies the parts of the law which separate Jew and Gentile and he affirms the parts and insists on keeping the bits which keep the church from idolatry and immorality, thus preserving both the unity of the new people of God and its purity (see p. 1108 n. 272), this frankly does not conjure with the full radicality of Paul’s ethics and covenant theology.

At no point in the Mosaic covenant are we told that God’s people should be committed to no oaths, no divorce, no violence, no food laws, no circumcisions, or even the love of enemies. These new things reflect a new covenant, not merely a renewal of the old one, and new covenants have new commandments, however much they may also adopt old ones and make them part of the new covenant. The Law of the Spirit of life, is not the same as the Law of sin and death merely renewed or redefined in Christ and the Spirit (see Romans 8.1ff).

New creatures in Christ are new in the sense that Adam was a new creature on earth. They are not merely newly redefined Jews or new members of a highjacked Israel (thought to = the church). Ethnic Israel still has a purpose and a promise in God’s plan of things in the future according to Rom. 11, and the new people of God, Jew and Gentile in Christ, have become the new humanity, not merely the true Israel. Non-Christian Israel will one day be incorporated into the new people of God when Christ returns. Paul does not use the term Israel to refer to non-Jews or the church writ large, though clearly Paul does think that true ethnic Jews like himself are followers of the Messiah, and someday that will be true of ‘all Israel’ (whatever sized group that signifies).

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