Paul, page 5
Conceivably, had Paul known about atoms and molecules, he would have put all this in different terms. What he is affirming and denying is clear: resurrection means transformed body, not walking corpse or disembodied spirit. We can hardly criticize him for not being able to define ‘spiritual body’ more clearly. His information on the topic was almost certainly derived entirely from his experience of encountering the risen Lord – an experience which he does not describe in his letters. That experience led him to the statements we have seen, which stop a good deal short of being a full definition. We cannot describe that experience on his behalf and then improve on his definition of the resurrected body, and we must be content to know only what he thought.
The end of the world
Did Paul think that the return of the Lord, the transformation of the living and the raising of the dead, meant ‘the end of the world’? It is possible to construe 1 Thessalonians 4: 13–18 in that way: the transformed believers meet the Lord in the air and stay there, and the kingdom is in heaven. It is more likely, though, that Paul thought that they would ascend to meet the Lord and then return to earth with him. According to Philippians 3: 20f. the Christians’ ‘commonwealth’ is in heaven, and they expect their saviour to come from there. He is probably coming for a purpose: to establish his reign on earth. Similarly in 2 Corinthians 5: 1f., Paul speaks of ‘putting on’ the building that comes from heaven; that is, it will come down and engulf what is mortal (‘from heaven’ is not clear in most translations). Finally, we note that Paul expected the entire physical universe to be transformed. ‘Creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay’ (Rom. 8: 21). It is very likely, then, that Paul accepted the common Christian view that Jesus would establish his reign on earth, but on a transformed earth, one no longer subject to decay.
On the other hand, 1 Corinthians 15: 24f. points towards a final dissolution of the world: after Christ has reigned for a while, and destroyed all enemies, he will hand the kingdom over to God. The Son himself will be subjected to God, that ‘God may be all in all’ (so, correctly, the New English Bible (NEB), Jerusalem Bible (JB), and New International Version (NIV); the RSV misleadingly has ‘may be everything to every one’).
Going to be with the Lord immediately after death
Another difficulty led to a different formulation of the future expectation. The difficulty was Paul’s own imprisonment at the time he wrote Philippians. We do not know just when or where that was, and so we cannot say that a chronological development had taken place, but the imprisonment did make Paul consider the possibility of his own death before the return of the Lord. In some ways he hoped for it:
Even if I am to be poured as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. (Phil. 2: 17)
For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two: My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account. Convinced of this, I know that I shall remain. (Phil. 1: 21–5)
Here we see that Paul thought that if he died he would ‘depart’ and ‘be with Christ’. Conceptually, this is different from the expectation of the transformation or resurrection of all believers at the coming of the Lord. We see here the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul, which is individualistic rather than communal. It envisages the ascent of each person’s soul at death, rather than the transformation of the entire group of believers, whether living or dead, at Christ’s return. Without posing these two conceptions to himself as alternatives, Paul simply accepted them both. If he died, he would immediately be with Christ; at the end the Lord would return and bring his own, in a transformed state, to be with him.
The present beginning of the transformation
In 2 Corinthians 3: 52–5: 50 we see further efforts to formulate what the final state of the believers would be. They will be transformed, but Paul considers that the transformation is already under way: ‘we all . . . reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Cor. 3: 18); ‘though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day’ (4: 18). On the one hand, the transformation from the old to the ‘new creation’ is already in progress; on the other, the process is not visible but internal.
Paul returns to the more purely Greek notion of the soul in the body, from which it may escape: ‘while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord . . . we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord’ (2 Cor. 5: 6–8).
Some have sought a chronological development from the ‘Jewish’ idea of the resurrection of everyone at the same time to the ‘Greek’ idea of the immortality of individual souls. This, however, is not the explanation. In 2 Corinthians 3–5 we find successively ‘inner renewal’ (3: 18), the promise of resurrection (4: 14) and the idea that the individual, to be ‘at home with the Lord’, must be ‘away from the body’ (5: 6–8). What appear to be conceptually different ideas lie side by side.
The neat distinction between ‘Greek’ and Jewish’ categories is probably a bit misleading. Not only were they not posed as alternatives by Paul, it is quite possible that some Diaspora synagogues had long since combined immortality and resurrection. In later Jewish and Christian literature they would be explicitly harmonized: at death the soul ascends to heaven, to await the resurrection; at the resurrection soul and body are reunited.
The expectation of the end of the present world order – one of Paul’s central convictions – appears too in what may be his last surviving letter, Romans (‘may be’ because Philippians and Philemon, the prison epistles, cannot be dated):
Besides this you know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand. (Rom. 13: 11–12)
Thus Paul, as long as we can follow his thought, continued to expect the arrival of the Lord. He had to alter aspects of this hope for certain situations – the crisis over the dead in Thessalonica and the possibility of his own death – and he also made use of the idea of individual immortality. But to the end his basic conviction remained.
Chapter 5
Theological presuppositions: monotheism and providence
Before we can understand the major disputes in which Paul engaged, and his responses to them, we need to explain presuppositions which he brought to the debate, presuppositions which his Jewish contemporaries, both friend and foe, generally shared. Paul inherited from Judaism two principal theological views: there is one God; God controls the world. These two views might seem to turn history into a puppet show, but they were not held simplistically. Most Jews reckoned with other powers in the world besides God, and they thought that humans could exercise freedom of choice. God’s control was usually seen as being exercised on a very large scale: ultimately the world would turn out as he intended. In general Jews did not deny that God could play a hand in everyday affairs, but they did not necessarily attribute every minor event to his will.
All of these points can be seen in Paul’s letters: he believed in one God; he thought that there were other powers in the universe besides God; he thought that God was exercising a grand plan in history; and he thought that individuals could decide to be with him or against him.
The one God and enemy powers
In 1 Corinthians 8 Paul considers whether Christians should eat food that has been offered to an idol. Some of the Corinthian Christians wished to do so, arguing that the idols were not real. They accepted monotheism more radically than did Paul. He replied that although idols do not really exist and although there is only one God, nevertheless there are many so-called gods and lords. The Corinthians should not eat food offered to them because they might be misunderstood as believing in idols. Thus far it might seem that Paul accepts radical monotheism, but in chapter 10 he returns to the topic: ‘What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God’ (1 Cor. 10: 19 f.).
So: there are no other gods, but there are demons. The ‘so-called gods and lords’ of 1 Corinthians 8: 4–6 are not really Gods and Lords, but they are something. Paul speaks of them in other ways: ‘beings that by nature are no gods’ (as the RSV nicely translates a difficult phrase, Gal. 4: 8); Satan, who disguises himself as the ‘angel of light’ (2 Cor. 11: 14); ‘another god’, who governs ‘this age’ (2 Cor. 4: 4); ‘rulers of this age’ (1 Cor. 2: 6); ‘principalities’ and ‘powers’ (Rom. 8: 38), or ‘principalities, authorities and powers’ (1 Cor. 15: 24). There were knees to be bent not only on the earth, but also above and below it (Phil. 2: 10). In the end, Christ will triumph (Rom. 8:38 f.; 1 Cor. 15: 24–6; Phil. 2: 9–11), but meanwhile these beings can create a good deal of trouble.
We should pay special attention to the degree to which Sin is treated by Paul as an enemy power. This is most clearly the case when the noun hamartia, sin, is the subject of a verb other than ‘to be’, as it is in Romans 5–7. According to Romans 5: 12, Sin ‘entered the world’; thereafter one reads that ‘Sin reigned in death’ (5: 21); that Sin may ‘reign’ in one’s body (6: 12) or ‘have dominion’ over one (6: 14); that Sin found opportunity in the commandment and ‘wrought in me all kinds of covetousness’ (7: 8); that it ‘revived’ (7: 9); that it found ‘opportunity in the commandment, deceived me and by it killed me’ (7: 11); and that it ‘worked death in me through what is good’ (7: 13). Sin as power may be served (6: 16–18), and thus it enslaves (6: 20). Put another way, Sin is a ‘law’ which lurks in one’s members and prevents the fulfilling of the law of God (7: 17–23). The only escape is to leave ‘the Flesh’ (8: 8), the domain of Sin, by sharing Christ’s death. Christians have died with Christ and thus to Sin (6: 2–11), and they have thereby escaped not only Sin but also the law (which condemns) and the ‘Flesh’, the state of enmity towards God (7: 4–6).
We shall return to Sin in Romans 6–7 just below, but here a few words are required in explanation of the term ‘the Flesh’. Paul sometimes uses it to mean ‘the physical body’, but in this section of Romans it often refers to the state of humanity when it opposes God. Thus, strikingly, Romans 7: 5f.: ‘while we were living in the Flesh . . . But now we are discharged from the law . . . so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.’ The ‘we’ refers to Paul and other Christians. They are no longer ‘in the Flesh’, though they are still in their skins with their body tissue intact. As Paul puts it in Romans 8: 9, ‘You are not in the Flesh, you are in the Spirit’, and the contrast of Flesh and Spirit continues (8: 9–13). My guess is that we see here the explanation of why Paul uses ‘Flesh’ to mean ‘humanity in the state of opposition to God’: it is simply the word which is opposite ‘Spirit’, which in turn denotes the divine power. This is, at any rate, the best way to decide when to capitalize Flesh, so that it points not to humanity as physical, but to humanity under an enemy power. It is the latter when there is a clear contrast between it and the Spirit of God. Then flesh becomes Flesh.
In this section of Romans Paul treats Sin as a power which is not only alien to God but almost as powerful; in fact, it often wins the struggle. It is important to note that Paul does not offer an anthropological, theological, or cosmological explanation of this conception of Sin. In the Jewish view, God had created the world and declared it good, a teaching which is not easily reconcilable with the view that Sin is a power strong enough to wrest the law from God’s control or to render humans powerless to do what is good (Rom. 7: 11, 19).
There are two principal passages which lead up to, but do not account for, the view that all humanity, apart from Christ, is under the power of Sin. In Romans 1–2 both Gentiles and Jews are accused of gross transgression (homosexuality and ‘all manner of wickedness’ on the part of Gentiles, robbing temples and committing adultery on the part of Jews), and Paul draws the conclusion that all people, ‘both Jews and Greeks, are under sin’ (Rom. 3: 9). The RSV here translates ‘under sin’ as ‘under the power of sin’ and this interpretation seems to correspond to Paul’s meaning. The accusation is not just that people transgress, but that all are governed by Sin. The charges of heinous immorality, however, do not actually account for Paul’s conclusion that everyone is under the power of Sin. This is so partly because his accusations are exaggerated. Both the Gentile and the Jewish worlds contained ‘saints’, people whose lives were largely beyond reproach. It is unlikely that Paul’s view of universal heinous transgression rested on empirical observation. Further, in the midst of his catalogue of charges Paul admits that some Gentiles, though without the law, nevertheless ‘do by nature what the law requires’, and these will be justified by their works in the judgement (Rom. 2: 13–14). The conclusion in 3: 9 does not correspond to what leads up to it in any respect: the charges in chapters 1–2 overstate the case and the conclusion is contradicted by 2: 13–14. What this means is that Paul’s conclusion, that all are under Sin, was not derived from the line of observation and reasoning which he presents in the previous two chapters.
The same is true of Romans 5, where Paul also argues for the universality of sin. Adam, he states, sinned, and this introduced sin and its consequence, death, into the world; ‘and so death spread to all people because all sinned’ (Rom. 5: 12). This is followed by the statements that ‘sin is not counted where there is no law’ and that ‘death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam’ (5: 13–14). In order to make the grip of sin universal, Paul wished to make Adam instrumental. Yet he had two problems: transgressions of the law which preceded the giving of it should not count; not everyone sinned, as did Adam, by rebelling against God’s commandment. Despite these problems he asserted the consequence: ‘by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners’ (5: 19). His anthropology (unlike Augustine’s) did not include the conception of inherited sin, and thus he had no logical way of ‘proving’ universal condemnation by appeal to Adam. He simply asserted it – while himself citing points which count against it. What we see in both cases is a conclusion that is independent of the arguments which precede it. Adam’s sin does not, in Paul’s own statement of it, prove that all humanity is sinful and stands condemned. The heinous sins of some Greeks and Jews do not, even in Paul’s own presentation of them, lead to the view that all humans are enslaved by Sin. This means that he held the conclusion as a fixed view and tried to bring forward arguments in favour of it, though without logical success. The conclusion, in other words, is not only independent of but is also more important than the arguments.
If the considerations put forward in Romans 1–2 and 5 do not explain the origin of Paul’s conception of Sin, can we say where it came from? There are two principal possibilities. One is that Paul did not come to Christianity with a pre-formed conception of humanity’s sinful plight, but rather deduced the plight from the solution. Once he accepted it as revelation that God intended to save the entire world by sending his Son, he naturally had to think that the entire world needed saving, and thus that it was wholly bound over to Sin. His soteriology is more consistent and straightforward than are his conceptions of the human plight. It seems that his fixed view of salvation forced him to go in search of arguments in favour of universal sin. This explains why Romans 1–2 and 5 are so weak as reasoned arguments but lead to such a definite conclusion. The conclusion that all need to be saved through Christ, since Paul received it as revelation, could not be questioned; the arguments in favour of universal bondage to Sin, then, are efforts at rationalization.
That is one explanation. The second is that Paul had imbibed aspects of a dualistic world-view, according to which the created order is at least partly under the control of the god of darkness. Iranian (Zoroastrian) dualism had penetrated the Mediterranean, and it can be seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, when they distinguish between the angel of darkness and the angel of light, the children of darkness and the children of light (for example, Community Rule 3: 17–4: 1). There are echoes of this terminology in Paul. In 2 Corinthians 11: 14, where Satan is said to disguise himself as the ‘angel of light’, Satan is, in effect, the ‘angel of darkness’.
It is probable that Paul had been influenced by dualism, especially since he considered the entire created order to be in need of redemption (Rom. 8: 19–23), though it could not have been guilty of transgression. But here we see that despite some influence of dualism, Paul was not a dualist. He proposed that it was God himself who had subjected the creation to ‘futility’, and that he had done so ‘in hope’, planning its redemption. Formally, there is no admission in Romans 8 of a second power, much less a second god. Yet Paul did believe in evil spiritual forces which he called by various names, as we noted above. These non-gods could blind (2 Cor. 4: 4) and enslave (Gal. 4: 8), as could Sin (Rom. 6: 6).
